The Angel of Music
by aeipathy
Summary: A retelling of the early history of the relationship between Erik and Madame Giry, beginning with his salvation at her hands from the gypsy carnival. Feedback is greatly appreciated.
1. Part One

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Disclaimer_: I don't usually like writing fanfiction, or reading it for that matter — because nearly all of it ends up being either sappy fluff or pointless smut, but certain stories draw me in and make me want to embarrass myself by writing my own clumsy renditions of them. This is one of those situations. I'm not as familiar with all the renditions of _The Phantom of the Opera_ as I would like to be, but I suppose I'm basing this on a number of them and merging my interpretations. Nonetheless I'd be very appreciative if you'd tell me what you think of my attempts.

_Part One_

The rope had been looped tightly several times around a wooden stake at the far end of the cage, so that there was little slack; it stretched taut and straining through the dusty air inside the bars to where it bound the creature's hands together by the wrists, palms facing together in a cruel mockery of prayer. Periodically the rope would leap and twitch, making an audible creaking sound of protest, as the bedraggled boy struggled to free himself, rebelling frantically against the horror shining in the faces of his spectators — it seemed to constrain him more than did the rope, more than did the looming form of the gypsy showman who dared to stand inside the cage with him, armed with a switch if the worst should occur.

She was called Giry by her peers and superiors alike; she felt that her given name was too frivolous and didn't suit her. Her overcoat was made of wool, but it was old, beginning to wear thin at the elbows — unlike the majority of the other girls she never attempted to affect wealth when her reality was a childhood with only the necessities.

However, it seemed that even the necessities had been withheld from the creature imprisoned before her; though the outlines of his muscles belied strength, his skin seemed pulled over them as taut as the rope that confined him. The canvas bag, knotted at two corners, had been pulled from over his head, revealing a long, matted tangle of dark hair, thick and clotted with dirt — but towards his temples, it grew thinner and disappeared altogether. His face was turned to the side as he wrestled with the rope that burned his wrists.

It was nearly impossible to guess his age from the face, as the features were so horribly distorted: his complexion was the same dirt-streaked olive as the rest of his skin, but the shade varied, mottled by what looked like scar tissue, uncreased and shiny. His nose disappeared into his face, forming a smooth plane into his cheekbones, and his eyes seemed permanently stretched wide to an abnormal degree, the dilated pupils and irises darting around in rage and clearly unwanted fear — a few scant hairs were no excuse for eyebrows, and his lips were nearly nonexistent, of the same texture and shade as the rest of his face, twisted and pulled back over nearly canine teeth.

Plain to see, that he had been denied much more food than would keep him alive; also that he was considered too low for ordinary clothing, as he was dressed simply in a pair of tattered trousers cut off at the knee — only enough to hide his indecency, not to make him feel in any way comfortable or concealed; the rest of his body was normally formed for his age (it indicated, where his face failed, that he was perhaps no older than Giry, and that he would develop further yet), but it inspired more horror in her than his face — it was horrifying in that it was untouched by the same decay, in that it was balanced and finely featured and had no similar deformity. It was a perfectly human body, neither indicative of disfiguring damage nor of uncommon comeliness. What was most beautiful about it was that it was normal, it was whole and unmarred; what was most revolting about it was that it was a daily reminder of what he might have been, the life he might have led.

But despite its normality he seemed to loathe it as well, burdened by the shame of it, and even while he recoiled against the rope he was crouched, trying to keep his back to everyone at once, shrinking into himself to hide his flesh.

Giry felt her overcoat excessive all at once, ashamed of it as he was of his body — she was ashamed of possessing it at all, while its threadbare appearance and worn edges disappeared from her mind. The subject of the exhibit had probably never been treated with a coat at all, let alone one as decent as hers.

"If you haven't dropped a coin in the hat, the monster is not for your eyes," said a voice over her shoulder suddenly, reminiscent of both a mix of old carriage gears and the grease used to soften them.

She turned abruptly to find that the showman's partner, a gypsy as well, was smiling grimly at her. His hair, long and lank and thin, was parted unevenly over a tanned, visible scalp, and he was thrusting a battered, upside-down hat at her. Her eyes were drawn uneasily first to the gaunt fingers gripping the brim of the hat, the color of the dirt under her feet and under the untrimmed fingernails — then to the flash of light caught by the coins at the bottom of the hat.

She had only a few coins on her person and felt no real desire to part with them — the fact that all the other girls of the ballet, who were flocking around the bars of the giant cage, had already dropped in a coin without even thinking of it, did little to increase that desire. She could easily have walked away from the exhibit and to another, but she felt drawn to the cage, to the prospect of moving closer and seeing more, however morbid the idea; she felt drawn to the pitiful creature to which all other eyes were turned, a pull as strong as the rope keeping him in place. With a nod, she reached into her pocket and withdrew her purse, taking out a single coin and dropping it into the hat.

"I thank you for your generosity," the gypsy breathed, with an overly gallant bow. "Feel free to get closer to the cage, mademoiselle — the monster may appear fierce but is contained quite skillfully by my partner. You need have no fear."

Giry said nothing. She could always trust herself not to speak rashly, but at the moment she felt compelled to share her opinion with the gypsy about the exhibit and the injustice of the boy's imprisonment. She nodded again, once, and moved quickly away from him, towards the crowd gathered around the bars.

Taunts and insults came from the assembly of spectators, curses dripping with disgust, horror, and perverse intrigue. Giry looked from one person to the other, finding the gaping sadism on their faces more appalling than the deformity of the creature they demeaned. Clearly they feared him — mothers shielded the eyes of their young children even as they joined in the cacophony of hatred — but the rope and the bars between them made it much easier for them to volley their epithets and outcries.

"Oh, its face!"

Alerted by the cry of a little girl, who then proceeded to burst into tears and bury her face in the skirts of her mother, Giry thrust herself forward, squeezing between the hefty bodies of two men before her, and found herself pressed against the cage. To steady herself she raised her hands to grip the bars, her face nearly caught between them, and she found that she was so close to the creature on the other side of them that she could make out the scabbing lacerations on his back, the still-evident results of the showman's attempts to "contain" him.

Her typical composure melted away at that sight, sinking beneath the surface of rising indignance and anger — her hands tightened around the bars until the color fled from her knuckles and was replaced by whiteness.

Suddenly the creature turned, as though sensing her presence behind him; still pulling back from the rope his torso twisted, his head revolving to look over his shoulder sharply at her.

Giry felt her heart seize, but she didn't move; she felt held by the intensity of the so-called monster's eyes as they locked on hers. However, he was unable to maintain contact with her for more than a moment or two — he seemed to become consumed with hasty fear, as though looking at any member of his audience for too long would be another submission, and he looked away, turning round again. His foot slid in the mud and his leg buckled, his weight coming crashing down onto his haunches — he seemed unharmed, his praying hands still in mid-air, and immediately he resumed struggling as the showman advanced toward him as though dancing around a malignant cobra.

In that instant she had made contact with his soul (or so it had felt like), and the memory of what his eyes had poured into hers was enough to keep her still and silent even when the showman brought the switch down on the side of the creature's arm to try to urge him back onto his feet.

In his eyes there had been fear, naturally, the fear that would come of being bound, unable to move when a much stronger and larger person is bearing down upon one with a weapon; it was natural to fear dozens of gawking eyes, the disgust and aghast shock that they all bore. But more powerful than the fear was naked fury — his resentment for those who had gathered simply to stare at him seemed to bristle under his skin as well as in the depths of his enormous eyes. Between bursts of desperate motion he shot glares of pure contempt at the gypsy showman, seeming not to feel the pain that the switch had inflicted on his arm, though the flesh welled and reddened rapidly. It seemed clear from the hot loathing in his eyes as they darted through the audience that he would willingly slaughter each of them, repay them for his brutal treatment at their hands.

When the two men behind her began to move away, drifting backwards, Giry found herself forced to support her weight by her hands on the bars, rather than by her feet and by the girth of the men — the crowd was beginning to leave.

The gypsy's voice sounded far away, raised though it was, almost sucked in and devoured by the continued murmuring and jeering of the crowd. "Ladies and gentlemen, may I ask you to step this way to see the next exhibit — should you look upon the Devil's Child for too long, you might find yourself cursed with the hatred of his Father, Lucifer himself, and I would wish that upon no patron of mine. Please, this way, this way."

One by one, then in small groups, the onlookers began to move away from the cage — some reluctantly, still desiring to get a closer look at the creature, and others gladly, relieved by the newfound opportunity to turn away, to pull their children from the bars. Giry released the bars and stepped back, eyeing them: a man passed her with his shoulders hunched, his face darkened by stormy guilt; an elderly woman with a concerned face crossed herself hurriedly before disappearing out the flap of the tent. The gypsy stood alongside the curtain, ushering the patrons through, until no one remained but himself and Giry, who approached with the same reluctance as some of the others had done, but with none of their morbid greed.

The gypsy smiled at her again, a skeleton's smile. "I can sense your fascination with our creature, mademoiselle."

Giry averted her eyes, but said nothing. She could not deny the truth — she was every bit as fascinated by the creature as all the others were — but at the same time, she felt for him overwhelming pity, an ache in her chest and stomach that made her feel loathe to leave the cage.

Sensing her shame, her sympathy, the gypsy tsked at her, his bony finger wagging slowly back and forth. "I must caution you not to feel such pity for him. He is human, woefully, but afflicted with a deformity that binds him not to earth, but to hell — he is not of our flesh, nor of our same spirit. He speaks only to threaten and curse, and shows no signs of common intelligence. It is a kindness, that we favor him with this life — were he out of our protection he would be killed on sight, for his twisted soul shows upon his face and makes very clear his Father's heritage."

Giry found herself speechless. The words built up in her throat like bile and threatened to spill from her mouth, but she kept her lips tightly shut, unwilling to offend. Even her faith-filled upbringing could not lead her to believe that the creature in the cage was descended from the Devil, and in his eyes she had seen not only intelligence, but a spirit more powerful than any she had encountered. It was impossible for her to express to the gypsy her inexperienced rage, that he thought he was doing the boy a "favor" by locking him up, beating him, and displaying his hideousness to the world.

The gypsy did not seem to mind her silence. He gave a bow. "Forgive me, mademoiselle, but I must hasten to the next exhibit — other curious spectators like yourself are awaiting my narration. The Devil's Child must be untied until the next showing, and I fear his reaction to your presence when he is not bound, though bars will still keep him from you. Please follow me."

He smiled slyly at her a last time, his cracked lips spreading to show yellowed teeth, and then disappeared behind the curtain, holding the coin-filled hat close to him as though cradling a baby.

Her heart heavy, Giry made as though to follow him, but couldn't bring herself to leave. She paused, turning to look back a last time at the creature.

Inside the cage, the boy seemed to have wilted now that the crowd had left him and the gypsy had backed away. Instead of struggling to remain on his feet, he had slunk down onto his haunches a second time, finally feeling the pain of the blows dealt to him during the show, and he leaned back heavily against the bars, his shoulders slouched, his face hidden by his mane of tangled hair.

Shooting him a last look of contempt, the heavy, stout gypsy tucked the switch beneath his arm and walked slowly towards the door of the cage. Giry noted discreetly the way he walked — how he kept his front to the boy at all times, as though suspecting that the moment he turned his back the creature would leap upon him. The gypsy bent and began to pull the loops of rope off of the wooden stake in the corner near the bars, his movements erratic as though he was prepared to run out of the cage the moment the rope had been loosed. There was a final loop left on the end of the rope that he kept in his hand as he moved towards the door — he refused to let it go even as he unlocked the door, put the key back in his pocket, and prepared to leave. He was taking no chances.

Giry felt even more disheartened by the caution with which the gypsy moved; clearly he had absolutely no humane trust for the creature. All of a sudden, though her absorption with the boy remained, she felt that she couldn't keep her eyes on the scene any longer — her stomach was twisting with sickness.

Possibly, with time, she would be able to forget the events of the day. Exhaling deeply, she tightened her fingers in the pockets of her overcoat.

Before she could leave, she saw both the gypsy and the boy turn suddenly in the corner of her eye — they had each neglected to notice that anyone else was present and had so been startled by the violence of her sigh. She looked back unsurely, and then saw the eyes of the boy slide from her to the gypsy, and they seemed alive with piercing thought — it almost seemed that his body was tensing like a cat's, his weight shifting onto his feet, his crouched body tightening.

Giry could have cried out; she could have done something to warn the gypsy. But again her voice failed her, and this time she had to wonder whether she would have said anything had she held the strength to do so.

Twisting his hands, the creature gripped the rope leading from his own wrists and gave a sharp pull — the gypsy, unprepared, found the rope jerked out of his grasp, and began to turn immediately, his hand straying toward the switch under his arm. But the creature moved faster, making a clumsy but accurate toss with the rope, and the noose-like loop at the end of it lashed and caught the gypsy around the neck. Giry felt her body harden like a statue, her eyes wide, her teeth biting into her lip — had she screamed, the other gypsy, the spectators, would have come running.

The gypsy staggered, snared, and the switch fell from his hands to the straw and mud at the floor of the cage. He lost his balance and toppled over, heavy as a tree, the weight of his body seeming to make the entire cage vibrate. Immediately the creature was upon him, his much lighter weight nonetheless like a small boulder on the gypsy's chest, and as Giry watched in horror the creature tightened the noose, pulling it with all his strength — the muscles in his arms shifting beneath the dirty skin, he pulled so hard that she thought the gypsy's eyes would fly from his head. The gypsy's body struggled and thrashed wildly beneath the creature, almost throwing him off, showing the same violent panic that the boy had displayed during the show, but there was nothing he could do.

The gypsy's arm flew up and clouted the creature on the side of the head, and the boy stumbled off the gypsy's chest. However, the gypsy's arm flopped back down helplessly, his fingers scrabbling, and the rope remained tightly around his neck, cutting off his breath. The noises choking out of his strangled throat were almost enough to make Giry ill — but they stopped, dying away, and the fingers stopped their twitching.

For a long moment there was silence — Giry stood unmoving, staring at the cage, and the creature held the rope still in his hands. His hair was again over his face, hiding his expression from Giry's face, but his similar stillness, his trembling arms, indicated to her that he was shocked by his own actions: horrified but at the same time filled with hesitant joy, uncertain of his new freedom, terrified that it would be again stolen away from him. Releasing the rope, he glanced over and reached out haltingly, picking up the canvas sack which had formerly hidden his face from the audience, the holes cut in it for his eyes gaping back at him silently.

Giry heard the other gypsy's voice in the distance suddenly, far on the other side of the curtain, but he sounded unsure himself, as though wondering why his partner had not yet appeared — and Giry felt a wave of fear.

"Quickly," she said, her voice low. "Go!"

The creature's head snapped up and he stared at her, remembering her presence suddenly. His eyes seemed even larger, their amber-brown color suddenly intense in the light, and his mouth was closed tightly, his face full of blank confusion.

Giry's feet moved at first of their own accord, one before the other, and then she became conscious of her actions and gained control of them, quickening and hurrying to the door of the cage. It was still slightly ajar, as the gypsy had been preparing to go when the creature had noosed him, and though her fingers were shaking as badly as were the boy's, she pulled the door open and rushed inside. The creature, at close range, looked no less frightening, but at the same time more human — he was nothing more than a boy.

She stopped suddenly, no more than three paces from him. However, it was no longer fear that made her keep her distance; surprisingly, she was in no way concerned that he would show violence to her as he had the gypsy. Perhaps it was a fear that she would have been right to harbor, but her mind was absent of anything but urgency.

"They'll come and see this at any moment. We must leave, now." Her voice was even but not calm.

She knelt and found herself staring into the open-eyed face of the dead gypsy. She would simply have pulled the rope from the boy's hands, but the knots were beyond her experience, and the only other option was to take the rope from around the gypsy's neck and carry it with them. Though she was a composed child, disturbed neither often nor easily, she had to close her eyes as she reached out blindly and managed to lift the gypsy's head, loosening the noose and pulling it out from under him.

As though unable to recognize his own liberation, the creature stared at the open door, torn between the urge to move and the fear of the possibility of moving.

Giry felt uncharacteristic panic welling up as she rose to her feet and began to back away, clutching the rope in her hands. She hurried out the door, but noticed when the rope became taut that the boy hadn't moved, and alarmed, she looked back at him, her brows drawn in confusion.

"Come," she commanded frantically, as though instructing a dog. "Quickly!"

She gave another pull to the rope, and the boy seemed to come out of his reverie, blinking rapidly with his deformed lids, his eyes growing moist. He needed no further commands, and suddenly he bolted with more force than she had expected, nearly knocking her to her feet as he raced out of the cage and past her. The noose was still in her hands, and she was jerked along behind him, staggering in an effort to keep up as he picked up an edge of the tent and slid out under it, dragging her with him.

To be continued.

Feedback is more than welcomed!


	2. Part Two

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Notes_: I want to thank those who read and reviewed; it's very courteous of you to do. **Snickers**: I'm so glad you're enjoying it! **Marie Erikson**: You in particular left a wonderfully detailed and receptive review; thank you so much — I'm so pleased that it has spoken to at least one person. **Macbeth's Lady**: In response to your question, I was a little hesitant to classify this story as a romance, as it's not strictly a love story — I'm not too sure of where it's going to go yet, and there may be some slightly romantic tones to it, but it won't be a straight romance at any stage. I hope that isn't disappointing to anybody; I don't know enough about love to write a strictly romantic story.

_Part Two_

In the darkness of the street, the creature seemed less conscious of his appearance — rather than trying to hide his face he seemed concerned only with escape. However, the moment he found himself confronted with the cold air of the evening and the pale illumination of the street lamps, his pace stumbled and slowed, and he looked around, confused and lost.

Giry looked around quickly, and then turned to the creature, preparing to run again. "Follow me," she said, keeping her voice low to avoid attracting attention from those outside the alley, "I know of a place."

The building in which she studied to become a member of the girls' ballet was only a matter of minutes away — when she pulled the creature forward and led him around the nearest corner, the dark silhouette of the Opera Populaire loomed comfortingly past the row of shops and markets, a black beacon in the night. She had spent her time at the Opera so far learning not only how to hold her arms and twist her feet, but as well how to navigate through unlit passages and sneak through abandoned catacombs, impressing the other girls with both her fearlessness and also her disregard for their awe. She knew entrances to the passages in the Opera that had been overlooked even by the hired help and the stage hands.

They approached the building softly but stealthily, the boy tripping on unfamiliar ground behind her as she led him by the rope. His hands were still bound awkwardly in front of him, the canvas bag that had been used to eclipse his face and head now clenched in his fingers, and she pulled him along as though guiding a sheep on a line.

The grated window on the ground along the sidewalk, she knew, swung open easily if tried with some semblance of force — and once entered it would lead the way to a number of labyrinthine stone passages accessible only by a locked door near the kitchens that no one entered; she had stolen the key long ago, and its disappearance had attracted no notice. There were rooms and caverns, places that were still covered with dust from years of negligence and secrecy — he would be safe there — he could hide.

She stopped him and crouched, wrapping her fingers around the bars of the grate, and gave it a sharp jerk towards her. After a moment it gave a loud creak and jumped open, nearly bowling her over, but she regained her balance at the last moment.

"Go in, quickly," she said, hushed, pushing at his shoulder and trying to guide him into the grate.

He nearly fell to the ground, all his motions jumbled and confused, but he managed to lower himself and slide through the open grate, landing on the stone ledge that waited inside the hallway and chamber below, about two feet above the floor. Giry, still clutching the other end of the rope that bound his wrists, looked around hastily, reassuring herself that they had not been seen, and then slipped in after him, finding that he had moved to the floor already and left the ledge open to her.

She pulled the grate shut behind them hurriedly and dropped to the floor as well, trying to catch her breath now that they had safely escaped. She listened, but heard no chaos from the street above them — only the typical hoof beats and chatter of the busy Parisian evening.

Trying desperately to regain her composure, unexpectedly jostled by the ordeal, she pressed her hand against her chest to calm her racing heart, and exhaled. The other girls of the ballet would be missing her, but she would devise an appropriate explanation later; she had been sick, she had felt faint, the exhibits had frightened her (would they believe such a thing?) and she had hurried home by herself to sleep early.

"We should be safe now. They won't come for us here — they won't know."

The boy was similarly shaken by the experience, his breath rattling in his chest, his eyes shifting around the chamber warily and with obvious fear; pressing his back against the wall half in and half out of the range of the light that shone through the grate, he sank down, pulling up his knees.

Giry found that the rope was still in her clutches, and she remembered abruptly that his wrists were still bound. She looked up quickly and saw that his hands were resting on his knees and still forced to face each other — in that position, with that look of uncertainty and desperation, he had never looked more as though he was praying than at that moment. Without hesitation she hoisted herself up from the floor, leaning on the wall for support, and then walked towards him.

"Forgive me — I forgot that your hands were tied." She found herself at a loss for a moment, crouching before him to inspect his hands, not noticing the wideness of his eyes as he stared down at her and unconsciously backed even further into the wall.

She wouldn't be able to undo the knots with her hands — they had been done with exceptional skill and strength, to be certain that the creature could never free himself during the middle of a show, ruining the exhibit with an outburst of violence and possibly even an escape. She scanned the stone walls and floors with her eyes, searching for something sharp enough to cut through the rope, and eventually laid eyes on the shard of a stone that had likely been disturbed from the wall and then shattered on the ground.

She grabbed his hands, ignoring the way he jerked immediately at her touch, and began to carefully saw through the rope with the sharp stone, watching so as not to cut either him or herself. At first nothing seemed to happen, but as the first threads gave way, the others followed suit, and after the work of a minute or two the rope fell from his hands, landing in a coiled, dusty heap on the floor.

Putting down the stone, she eyed him, at a loss. "Your hands must be numb," she said simply.

He looked down at his wrists through eyes as large and staring as the sockets of a skull, and then rubbed them with his fingers, trying to stir up the life in them. He was silent, though his lips twitched and his throat moved as though he was trying to force out a sound.

Giry inched closer, waiting patiently. She had cared for her younger siblings; she had learned patience.

For a moment he tried to look at her face, his own overtaken with shock — he seemed utterly lost as to why anyone would try to help him, and her kindness to him thus far was something he had never encountered. He seemed to know that he should feel grateful for it, but at the same time he couldn't help fearing her, suspecting that her generosity was a facade and that at any moment she would reveal herself to be simply another horrified spectator, another person determined to take advantage of his hideousness for her own benefit. Yet his instincts toward gratitude outweighed this suspicion, and he struggled to find something to say to thank her with sufficient clarity.

Before he could come up with the words, the boy's eyes fell on the bag next to him, which he had dropped upon sitting down — it reminded him that his face was uncovered and in plain view for her to see, and this seemed to distress him terribly. More rapidly than she could stop him, he snatched up the bag and pulled it over his head, turning his face away from her and hiding in the folds of canvas, even his eyes invisible in the shadows that fell from the ragged holes. His recently freed arms wrapped around himself as though trying feebly to hide his body from her as well, and he shrank away.

It was almost a relief when he hid his face, though she was ashamed to admit it — now that she had secured their safety her mind was present and able to observe his deformities without distraction, and it was difficult; it took a great deal of strength to look him in the face without showing her wonder, her pity.

However, she wanted not to hide her reaction but to extinguish it — she felt contempt for her own thudding heart when she saw his face, and hated that she could not look upon him as she could anyone else. After the risks she had just taken she wanted nothing less than to make him feel that his disfigured features frightened her or revolted her as they clearly did everyone else with whom he had come into contact.

It was fortunate that his face was turned away, that he couldn't see her as she reached out and closed her fingers around one of the knotted corners of the bag. In a quick motion she pulled it back off his head before he could grab at it, and hid it behind her back.

He scrabbled immediately to retrieve it, his eyes flashing with rage, but saw that his attempts were futile and pulled his hands back to himself. The rage dissolved first into terror, that he was revealed again, and as he tried to burrow into the wall he looked sideways over at her, clearly expecting a gasp, tears, or even silent dismay — but she had managed to contain herself well, and all that showed on her face was quiet pity and understanding.

The boy stared at her, more shocked by her reaction than she was shocked by his ugliness. His shoulders trembled and he lifted his hands to cover his face, trying to hide as much of his scarred flesh as possible, his voice coming out soft and muffled from beneath his palms.

"Don't look at me," he said, between begging and commanding, his voice harsh in contrast to his imploring words. "Please, don't look at me — don't ever look at me."

Giry was astonished that his voice came out so normally — that it sounded so human, so clear and even beautiful, its tone and timbre emphasized by their contrast to his deformed face. She had not cried for years — she didn't often feel the urge to cry in response to sadness or misery — but the pleas that he had made struck her as suddenly as a downpour. While normal, his voice had sounded so full of sorrow, so hateful of his own body — so desperate to avoid frightening her away in the same manner that his appearance had destroyed so many chances of human friendship in the past.

She felt her throat constrict and it became difficult to breathe, and though her vision blurred slightly, she did not allow herself to weaken further. She reached out with both hands and took his wrists, pulling them away from his face — at first he resisted, but feeling her force, he relented, and looked back at her with the same shock as before, his own eyes having overflowed shamefully and spilled down his ruined face.

"Everything will be fine," she told him in a soft but firm voice, trying to reassure him. "This place is your home — where you will live from now on."

The boy swallowed visibly, his throat shifting again. He seemed not to believe her.

Giry found that it was becoming easier to look upon his face, now that she had glimpsed his humanity. The fury in his eyes as he had strangled the gypsy seemed impossible as the childish tears shone on his distorted cheeks; he seemed incapable of any such act, the victim of lifelong violence as he was.

"Tell me your name," she requested kindly, still holding onto his wrists, but keeping her grip light.

He was silent for a long moment, leading her to wonder whether he had a name at all — whether it had been stolen from him along with his dignity and his childhood. However, after what seemed an eternity he cleared his throat and said, his voice still hoarse, "Erik."

With effort she found a way to smile at him. "Erik," she repeated, and with reluctance introduced herself as well. "But you may call me only Giry; everyone else does." It seemed silly to talk of such things now, and she took a breath, folding his hands inside her own. "I will take care of you, Erik. No one will ever be able to find you. You will be safe here, I promise — I will protect you. I will make certain that no one ever harms you again."

To be continued.

Feedback is more than welcomed!


	3. Part Three

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Notes_: I was so happy to find so many reviews in my inbox! It's been so long since I've done this sort of thing that receiving comments is both miraculous and inspiring. Thank you to everyone who gave me praise, including **BohemianCane04**, **All Apologies**, and **Laura Kay**. **Dimac99**: I'll try to update again soon, I promise! **CloudxInxCrimson**: Thank you so much for putting me on your lists! I'm sorry it almost made you cry**. Marie Erikson**: Your reviews are always so eloquent and full of things worth conversing more thoughtfully; would you mind if I emailed you to respond to your comments? **Chibi Hime**: Thank you so much for the compliment! I was hoping that I was doing all right portraying them, particularly Giry. **Bettamutter**: I always love it when people tell me particular parts that they were most fond of. Detail and imagery are very important to me, and it's wonderful to have you tell me that I succeeded at my attempts.

_Part Three_

Her shoulders were heavy with guilt as Giry took her leave from the chambers; she had no choice but to leave Erik alone, with only the coiled rope as his companion, until she was to return some hours later. She wanted with unprecedented desperation to stay with him — it seemed that leaving him alone was the greatest possible sin she could commit — but knew that her presence would be required by the other ballet girls; she would need to explain her absence that evening, and only after they all retired to bed would she be able to return to Erik's side.

He had stopped her, as she'd tried to leave; asking almost inaudibly, in a halted voice, for her to give back the crude excuse for a mask that he had been confined to for the majority of his time with the gypsy carnival — the canvas sack, the garish eye-holes its only window to the outside world.

Giry had been reluctant. "Why do you want it?" she had asked quietly, his grubby hand still clutching the edge of her skirts to stop her. "You have no need to hide your face from me."

Yet he was still unable to look her in the eye, his face uncovered as it was, and he could come up with no response. It seemed that speaking was still unfamiliar to him — Giry was partly surprised that he had any knowledge of the French language at all, considering how rarely he had likely been permitted to speak in his time with the gypsies. As it was, Giry had tried to speak to him, to question him, but he answered only when absolutely necessary — only when he felt confident that his response would not garner a blow or an insult.

She had studied him for a moment, and finally conceded. Perhaps it would comfort him in her absence. "Very well." She held out the crumpled sack, exhaling. "But please, do not put it back on."

He took it and was silent, turning away, but he did not move to defy her.

* * *

That evening, Giry caught up with the other girls, who had somehow garnered the courage to poke at her and tease her relentlessly for her disappearance from the carnival. She surprised them all with a smile in reply, stiffening only when one of the girls came out with a sudden and unexpected announcement: 

"You left too early to hear of it — it seems that one of the freaks escaped from the carnival, and while we were only in the next tent!"

Another joined in, growing excited by the recollection. "They say that he killed one of the gypsies and broke free from his cage. No one knows where he is — there's been no sign or sighting of him in all of Paris."

She was quiet for a long moment, relieved by the last piece of information. They gathered round, looking at her curiously, puzzled by her silence. Realizing her error, she turned back to them and her smile came back, though thinly. "That's terrible. I hadn't heard a thing about it. I'm sorry to have worried all of you, but I began feeling horribly ill, and all I could think to do was return home. I was afraid that I might faint."

A girl laughed at her, eyeing her. "You, faint? What a sight that would be."

* * *

The room was silent and dark, the shades pulled, and the last candle had been blown out; only the faintest outlines of shadows were visible, the angles of the beds, the draping bedcovers, a stray pair of shoes, a chair. The blackness was tinted with blue, casting an otherworldly hue to the forms of the girls of the ballet as they lay sleeping — Giry watched them from beneath her blankets with the hard, wary eyes of a hawk, waiting until the last girl's breath had become even and quiet, until the last restless shifting beneath the sheets had died down to a soft stillness. 

Discreetly she slipped out of her bed, the touch of her bare feet on the floor as light and noiseless as the weight of a mouse. In only her nightdress, she felt along carefully until she made her way to the door of the ballet girls' dormitory, searching blindly for the bundle she had tucked beneath the oak dresser earlier that evening.

She had managed to convince Francis, one of the servant boys, to lift for her a pair of trousers and a man's shirt from one of the costume rooms, promising him a favor in return. Tucked within the clothes was a covered plate of food that she had spirited away when the cook's back was turned, and a flask of water; some unlit candles, a box of matches. It would be a task, carrying the entire bundle through the dark hallways until she reached the corridor behind the kitchens, where the door to Erik's chambers was located. She would hold a candle in her hand, but to keep herself from dropping it, or burning herself, would require coordination with which she did not trust herself.

On several occasions she nearly tripped along the way, rushing to wrap her arms tighter around the bundle lest a part of it spill and fall to the floor. Her feet, covered now only by slippers, were prickling with the coldness of the floors and carpets, and her eyes strained to see through the darkness — the candle provided only a minimal illumination. It was a strange urge that compelled her forward through the obstacle course that was comprised of unlit hallways and precarious corners — she felt that any delay was a failure on her part, and worry consumed her. She felt weighted down with icy fear of the possibilities that might have befallen Erik in her absence — he had spent the scarce hours alone and afraid, and he was like a child, so closed from the world, so ignorant of the reality of humanity; he had been shown only the darkest and most brutal facets of his race.

At last she found the door, the candle throwing a pale light on its edges, though it blended into the wall and had been covered with the same wallpaper — someone, it seemed, had tried to rid themselves of the memory of its existence. She shifted the weight of the bundle and the candle, and managed to retrieve from her pocket the ancient brass key to which the door corresponded.

Erik was in a far room from the door; there were a number of stone corridors and sewer-like passages through which she tiptoed on her way to find him. His chamber, accessible by the grate on the sidewalk outside the building, seemed an eternity away.

Like a dog that has been commanded to stay, he was exactly where she had left him, curled up against the wall, just outside the squares of pallid moonlight from the grate.

"Erik?" she asked in a low voice, holding up the candle. It threw a feeble light on his form, causing him to curl tighter around himself. The mask lay on the ground by his feet.

He said nothing.

Giry was comforted, strangely, by his silence. She stepped down onto the cobbles of the floor, and knelt, setting the candle down beside Erik's body, along with the bundle of clothing and food. Pushing aside her nightdress, she lowered herself to sit beside him, wincing at the coldness of the stone against her legs, and she turned to him while taking out the unlit candles and pressing them into the cracks of the stone. As she lit them, more tiny lights were born, lending slight warmth and feeble glows to the darkness of the chamber.

"I've brought you clothes, and food," she said expressionlessly, unsure of what to do or say. Though she longed to comfort him, she doubted the possibility of his acceptance of her efforts, just as she doubted her own ability to display the maternal affection she felt she ought to.

He slowly looked over at her, his face still uncovered, his hair taking on an even more filthy semblance in the glow of the candlelight.

"You must be hungry," she said, feeling sadness press down her shoulders like a physical burden. She couldn't bear to look into his eyes. Instead, she turned to the bundle, unfolding the shirt from it and putting it to the side. She set down the flash and uncovered the plate, selecting first a chunk of bread that she held out to him. He looked at it with an intensity that belied his hunger, but something seemed to keep him from reaching out and accepting the food.

Giry furrowed her brows, puzzled by his reaction; she had half expected him to lunge at her, to rip the bread from her hands in his ravenous hunger and devour it immediately. His hesitance bewildered her. Guessing blindly, she broke off a small piece of the bread and put it in her own mouth, chewing and swallowing visibly.

"Please eat. I'm sure you're starving." She held out the bread a second time.

Erik slowly reached out and closed his hand around the bread, taking it from her gently. She had to keep herself from recoiling from his fingers — the streaks of dirt and mud, the overgrown fingernails, the cuts and scrapes and splintered skin.

After watching her eat the bread, grim proof that it was neither poisoned, nor spoiled, nor in any other way unfit for consumption, Erik seemed consoled by his earlier, unfathomable fears. Giry could not begin to wonder why he would think the food poisoned, and quickly avoided continuing on the train of thought; she didn't want to consider what other forms of taunting and torture to which he had been subjected by his previous caretakers, whether they were gypsies or perhaps even his own parents. She cleared her mind of such thoughts and concentrated on feeding Erik the meat, the cheese, the spare tomato she had rescued from the cutting board.

It became blatantly obvious to her that Erik could not allow her to watch him eat. After accepting the bread he had immediately turned himself away, hunching his shoulders and bowing his head, eating in the secrecy of the curtain of his hair. He was clearly ashamed of his crudeness, the fervent and uncultured way in which he ate, like a scavenger; she did not blame him for his lack of manners, as she doubted there had been anyone willing to teach him proper conduct. Despite her urge to turn him back around, she didn't want to make him more uncomfortable, and simply accepted his style of eating, allowing him to keep his back to her. When he was finished with one piece of food, she would simply hold out another, offering him the flask of water afterwards — it was the water he seemed to enjoy most, drinking it down so rapidly that drops would trickle from the corners of his mouth and fall from his chin.

When he was finished, she put her hand on his arm, saying nothing, but her request was clear; and obediently, but heavily, he turned back around, his hands on his knees, his face barely visible behind them. He stared at her now, her face more than her eyes; he was baffled by her kindness to him.

"As for the clothes," she said, pulling them nearer, "I'm sure they will be too large. But I think you'll find them at least more suitable than what you've been given."

Saying nothing more, she deposited the trousers and shirt into his hands, and then promptly turned herself the other way, as he had done while eating. There was a silence behind her — he did not understand her actions, but didn't dare ask her to explain them. Giry thought to herself that he must never have been treated with such respect; even past presenting him with clothing, no one would ever have turned the other way to allow him to change without supervision.

Without turning around, she said, "I will give you privacy while you put them on. You needn't feel embarrassed; I won't look."

After a moment, she heard soft scuffling and uncertain movements, and only when there was stillness again did she turn around. Erik had not risen, but remained crouched on the floor, now dressed in the awkward trousers and shirt — the cuffs of the trousers formed folds of excess length around his feet, and the sleeves of the shirt dangled beyond his fingertips, but they would do — they would have to do.

She attempted to disguise her disapproval of his filthiness as she regarded him with a critical stare. "I'll find a way to bring you hot water," she said, more to herself than to him. "I'll bring a pair of scissors and a comb, as well — to try to salvage your hair."

He only nodded, very slightly, looking down at his sleeves.

"I'll visit you at nighttime," she murmured, thinking pensively. "I think around now is the only time I will be able to see you without anyone suspecting anything. I'll try to sleep as much as possible during the day and then I will come down to see you when everyone else has gone to bed."

Erik was silent for a moment, clearly absorbing her words. Slightly surprised by the profession that she would make such sacrifices for him, he said hoarsely, "Thank you, mademoiselle."

Giry was startled from her reverie, and nodded.

Before she could say more, he continued speaking, taking her again by surprise: "But you shouldn't do that."

Her face was blank as she said, "What?"

"You've done enough — by bringing me here. I should be fine on my own. I can't ask — it wouldn't be right to ask you for more." His tongue snaked out and ran over his dry, cracked lips. "Thank you."

"Don't say such things." Giry's voice was brisk, hiding her emotions, and she shook her head, folding her hands and placing them in her lap. She looked straight at him, her eyes scanning his hair, his face, his body, all about him that required attention, guidance — she felt that by rescuing him she was now obligated to care for his needs, to teach him how to live. But more than that, she felt that she truly wanted to. "I can't leave you alone now — I wouldn't."

His eyes were dark, his voice cracking from negligence. "I've been alone."

"You won't be. Not now."

Erik's eyes were suspicious as they looked at her, almost threatening. Despite all her kindnesses thus far, he was unable to trust so easily — though by now even he could see that her intentions were good, he could not simply give himself over, place himself in her hands with no further hesitations. He seemed lost in his confusion, the dilemma of whether to surrender his trust to her or to refuse, to return to the risk of isolation.

At last he spoke again. "I — can't." His voice cracked again, but this time it seemed it was due to emotion. His hands begun to rub up and down his arms through the sleeves, unaccustomed to the sensation of being covered. "I don't know what it's like — not to be alone."

Giry looked at him. She swallowed, and reached out her hand. "You will learn."

Erik's chin trembled slightly, and he put his face down, his forehead on his knee, as though he couldn't bear to watch his own movements as he extended his own hand blindly until it bumped hers in the relative darkness. She wrapped her fingers around his and clutched them tightly. "I won't hurt you," she swore, and continued with precise sincerity that was almost methodical: "I won't lie to you. I won't leave. You must trust me — you must believe me."

A shiver ran through his body as though his instinct was to break his hand from hers and move away. "Why?" Silence, and then, his words barely distinguishable from the beginnings of tears that were filled with fury only at himself. "I don't understand. Why are you doing this? Why?"

"Do you think I'm so cruel? Do you think being kind requires so much effort?"

"But my face — my face —"

"That doesn't matter." She sought out his eyes, his lips, even the spare protrusion of his nose, but it seemed that he commanded the shadows, summoned them to hide him from view. "A man is a man — the worth of his soul is not tainted or lessened by the destruction of his body. This is what God tells us, Erik." She swallowed her own past doubts over the words of God, believing in nothing more strongly than what she now claimed.

He let out a choking, bitter laugh. "God...? God does not exist for me, mademoiselle. He gave me up — he left me to the vultures." A sob shook his body, his frame convulsing with what still was nearly laughter. "Vultures, they were all vultures — they fed on my flesh like carrion!"

Giry felt her stomach twist, growing nauseous from the strangled, enraged despair of his words. "No, Erik, don't think of it. Don't think now of the ones who hurt you — you must try to forgive them. They were blind."

At these words his hand tensed and he jerked it back, one of his legs falling sideways to the floor, his back collapsing against the wall. His arm on his knee, he now bowed his head only over his chest, his matted hair like a hood. His chest rose and fell raggedly, overtaken by his unsteady breath. "If only they had been blind! If only my face hadn't called to them like some sort of foul beacon in the darkness." He wiped at his eyes intolerantly. "I broke my own leg to make them take pity on me — so I would have to heal instead of be shown in front of all those eyes. I climbed my bars and threw myself to the ground. I couldn't walk for months — and still they locked me in my cage and showed me to the world."

Giry lowered her head, at a loss for words; breathing had become painful. She reached out again, inching forward on her knees, but he evaded her hand. "Calm yourself, Erik; please."

"They branded my flesh so I could never escape them — they scarred me with their names so they could always find me." Erik tore at the loose collar of his shirt, and though the candles' flames were weak they shed a tiny light on the visible shreds of his bare chest, on the small, scattered marks that clearly would never leave him. "You ask me to forgive? You ask me to pardon their brutality? I will never forgive them... I will never forgive a God who can abandon his children so easily!"

Her face burned with shame at her earlier words. It was beyond her, how she could have thought that words of God would comfort someone who had seen nothing but the ugliness of the world. She felt certain that she would be sick — the room seemed to spin as she paused before him and put her hand on his shoulder, her forehead sinking until she almost touched the back of her palm.

"Forgive me, Erik — if I could take it away I would. I would take it all away. Please, forgive me."

Erik slumped down, his breath shuddering out. "It's not you — it's not you." Helplessly he put his hand on her back, so bewildered by intimate physical contact that he was at a loss for what to do. "I'm sorry — I said too much."

"No." She shook her head. Realizing her actions, she pulled back, taking a deep breath and trying to compose herself. It had felt like such a long night that she was surprised that the room was still dark, that the sun had not yet begun to rise, its slumber shattered by the pain in Erik's voice. She shifted away from him and rose to her feet, her fingers clutching the fabric of her nightdress, and she moved into the shadows, out of the fractured shafts of moonlight that drifted through the grate and out of the reach of the tiny candles.

"Tomorrow night I'll bring you more food, and more candles. I'll try to find some clothes that would fit you better." Her face was calm again — throughout her childhood she had found that calling upon numbness was the best defense against breaking down. "And there's the hot water, and the scissors — the comb —" She counted upon her fingers blankly, trying to think of everything that would be needed.

"I'm very familiar with the chambers down here, below the Opera. I'm sure that everyone else has forgotten their existence, since the blueprints were destroyed and the doors locked — but I know the way, and I can show you the rest."

He nodded; he seemed to agree with her theory, and his face as well had gone relatively empty. He continued to rub impatiently at his face with the coarseness of his sleeve.

"Do you know how to read," she asked then, "or write?"

"No. I never learned."

"I'll bring books, then, and papers, and ink. When I can find time I'll teach you, and then you'll be able to read when you're bored, and write down your thoughts. I've found that it's a very soothing way to pass the time." Giry took a breath. "Is there anything else you would like?"

Erik opened his mouth as though to say something, but closed it and shook his head.

"No," she said, furrowing her brows. "What is it? What can I bring you?"

"I feel ashamed to ask."

"You shouldn't. If I can, I'll get whatever you'd like."

His eyes flicked down and to the side, without being conscious of doing so, and after a moment she followed the direction of his gaze with her own. He was looking unsurely at the crumpled remains of the canvas sack, the eye-holes staring through furrows of cloth and dirt back up at him. "I would like a new mask, if you could get one," he said. "One that isn't quite so — restrictive."

Giry began to speak, to protest by saying that she had already told him not to fear revealing his face to her; but after the conversation of the last hour, she felt too timid to do so. Instead she nodded, resolving to do her best but also to discuss the matter with him later.

As she moved towards the passage that would take her back up to the light, she looked at him over her shoulder, her face weakening and displaying tenderness.

"Good night, Erik."

* * *

_To be continued._

Feedback is more than welcomed!


	4. Part Four

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Notes_: Thank you to everyone who has left me such pleasant reviews! I'm sorry for the delay in updating this chapter; I've been giving a lot of thought to the things that I intend to make happen in the future of the story, so I did some rewriting and such to make certain that I wasn't mixing myself up. Who knows, I may still be lost in my own confusion, but oh well, I'll try my best.

_Part Four_

His voice was filled with petulant anger, but rather than sounding like a protesting child his indignant fury, his confusion at her repeated reaction to his request, made him almost fearful. As he crouched, perched on a protrusion of fallen rocks and cement bricks that had toppled from the wall of the catacombs, his eyes seemed to glow animalistically in the darkness; only the thin flow of water between them, like a tiny stream separating her bank from his, reflected the light cast from the torch that had been installed in the wall — like so many others throughout the basement chambers of the Opera Populaire — near the cobbled ceiling.

"Let me go."

Giry felt the blood and color fleeing her knuckles as she tightened her fingers around the fabric of her skirts, then winced; that hand, her right, was covered with a small number of painful cuts and scrapes. While creeping through the catacombs the night before, descending to bring Erik another stolen mask from the costume chambers (none of them were to his liking, it seemed, and none would ever be), she had slipped on the slimy surface of a rock and had thrust her hand before her for support — however, she had only succeeded on landing upon it, crushing it beneath her on a number of shattered rocks.

The cuts were barely anything, of course; they were only painful, only an irritation, but she resented her own clumsiness, and in some ways, Erik, for requiring her constant presence whenever she could get away. It had not been his fault that she had fallen — but somehow it was unfortunately easy to feel a tiny niggling of contempt for him nonetheless, particularly his lack of sympathy to see her hand covered in small bits of bandages. He had suffered so many injuries in his life, many of them far worse than her cut hand, that he was unintentionally insensitive to her apparent pain.

"Only for a day or so. Only to breathe the air again. I can assure you I won't run away."

"Must I tell you again, Erik?" Her voice was quiet but inadvertently chilly. "There is no place for you there. You know what will happen if anyone should see your face — they still talk of your escape from the gypsies, and as well of—" She stopped abruptly, noting how he bristled at her mention of his crime, and moved on.

"And even if they do not remember — even if someday they should forget — please keep in mind your face." She softened, as she always did, when she was forced to discuss the topic of his deformity. It was not something either of them enjoyed discussing. "All of the evil and hatred in men is brought out by your face. If you should ever leave these chambers, I would fear terribly for your safety. I do not think myself presumptuous to predict that you would be killed."

Erik was silent. He was no longer seething, but he seemed helplessly frustrated still, unable to make his point properly, lost in the confines of his own impairments — it would take him some time, Giry guessed, to catch up to her as far as human communication and conversation went. Often he could not find the words, or he would stumble over them — he would become embarrassed of what he had to say and so cut himself off, or unable to remain face to face with her for an extended period of time (mask or no mask), he would cover his face, bow his head completely, or turn round and look the other way.

"I feel stifled down here," he said, and his voice echoed softly and desperately off the dripping walls. "How long has it been?"

"Only a month, Erik."

"At least when I was with the gypsies I was made to travel — I could be in the sun from time to time." There was a small scuffling sound from the other bank, and his fingers, resting lightly on the boulders and bricks, seemed to be pulling at pebbles and scratching about absently. "I would be caged but at least I would feel the sunlight."

Giry's breath flowed through her lips stiltedly, and she felt a pain in her chest: pity for him, as always; the urge to stand over his bent form and envelop him in her arms; and also gnawing guilt. This feeling was a new birth — it had appeared suddenly and without warning after perhaps a week into her position as Erik's caretaker, and at times like these it would return strongly, almost strongly enough to break her. She would attempt to rationalize her culpability — she had no choice but to guard him, to protect him, to do whatever was necessary, for it was only in his best interests — it was for his sake. He had begun often to protest, to demand that she sneak him upstairs from time to time — sneak him out through the way they had come, perhaps, out into the night, when no one was around, when no one would see — but while his overly romantic idealism had flourished unknown in his mind during his imprisonment by the gypsies, Giry was often forced to confront him with the unbending hardness of the truth.

"I'm sorry, Erik," she murmured, bowing her head. Her voice was weary, but not unkind. "Why is it so difficult to cherish your home? Why must you want more?"

Erik seemed not to be listening. "I feel as though I might die here," he muttered, turning his head slightly to the side. "I've known darkness before, but never for so long — never like this. Here, I wake up every morning in a darkness as black as what I always imagined hell must be like."

"You call this hell?" She leaned back against the slick surface of the wall, taking her weight off her tired feet. "This place, which is your refuge? The only place on earth you might be able to live in peace, Erik?"

His eyes flicked up and once again seemed to gleam in the light, beacons through the carved holes of the thin, rough wooden mask he was wearing — temporarily, he had told her shortly when she had brought it; it was not enough, not what he wanted.

"Peace," he breathed. "I am not so sure if this is peace." Her lips seemed to tighten and he continued without looking at her, wincing as though he would not be able to bear hearing her words — it was plain that her unending efforts to aid him, and her constant failure to do so sufficiently, caused him as much guilt as his pain and his pleading caused her. "Please, Mademoiselle Giry, do not think me ungrateful. I am grateful — I will always be grateful to you for what you have done. I owe you my life." The sound of his tongue sweeping out over his lips was scratchy.

"But while these cellars are vast I feel trapped inside them. I know I will never be able to leave and I am plagued constantly, terrified, by the thought of it. I fear sleep because I know my rest will be black with nightmares — always the same nightmares, mademoiselle, and I do not dream of my past — I do not dream of the gypsies. I dream of my future, of a future spent and wasted in the bowels of this Opera. I dream of walls and doors and rock and water, never windows, never the sky, because these things are lost to me and I am beginning to forget the way sunlight feels on skin. The silence is enough to choke me with its numbness. I do not fear death, mademoiselle, I have not for the longest time, but I fear this silence, a silence that swallows up my sighs and my calls — I fear this darkness, that is not destroyed by candles and torches."

Giry's shoulders slumped, her brow creased. His words weighed upon her heavily, like the boulders upon which he was perched. Internally she felt twisted like barbed wire. Why could it not be easy? She had been so convinced that giving him the expansive, unknown cellar chambers as his home was the best thing she could have done; the safest, and really the only, option. How was it fair, that he was now subject to more pain? She felt weak with shame — she had not done enough, and he was still forced to feel grief.

"I have failed," she said, her voice hushed nearly to the point of a sigh. She caught her breath, though she had barely moved since they had stopped in the middle of the flooded corridor. "I have not saved you after all."

Slowly lifting her eyes, she saw he had covered his face, the mask, with his hands. "You did save me," he whispered, and said once more, "I owe you my life."

He paused, as though to continue, but then murmured, "Forgive me, Mademoiselle Giry; I should not have tried at this again."

She merely shook her head, unable to agree or disagree with him.

"If I may, I think I will go practice my letters," he said hesitantly, looking down at his hands, which he turned from palm to back and to palm again. "They still do not live up to yours."

* * *

The following week, Giry brought two presents to give to Erik. The first puzzled him quite a bit, as it was unfinished and, according to her, would require his patience and participation for its completion — in addition to some supplies, she had brought a peculiar bucket of what appeared to be white plaster.

"This is papier mache," she had explained. "With this I should be able to _make_ you a mask, one that is yours and yours alone. It will be your face, Erik."

The second present was composed of a number of smaller gifts: a sheaf of papers, upon which were penned several short bunches of blank parallel lines; more ink and quills; old, dusty books full of already completed lines of music; and finally, a battered case which upon its opening revealed a bow and an ancient, barely-functional violin, recently restrung. They would not notice its absence in the music rooms, she assured him; it was quite old and she had been forced to pull it from a closet and restring it herself. She confessed that she had played a bit of violin in her childhood and could still remember the essentials of the craft; using all these things, she would give to Erik her knowledge of notes, of sharps and flats; she would teach him music...

"...to conquer the silence," she finished softly.

* * *

_To be continued._

Feedback is more than welcomed!


	5. Part Five

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Notes:_ I can't apologize enough for the lateness of this update; the degree to which I have been lacking internet is absolutely horrendous, and debilitating to someone who has become so dependent on the web. Thank you to everyone for your wonderful attention and reviews!

_Part Five_

It was in the middle of a dress rehearsal that Giry began to realize the undeniable strength of Erik's will. She and the rest of the ballet girls were scattered across the stage in a careless mimicry of their intended arrangement, dressed in their slippers and skirts though their costumes on performance night would be much more taxing to their concentration. The immense velvet curtains were drawn back to reveal the unending, vacant seats of the audience, the boxes dark, the chandeliers extinguished – it was hardly inspiring to the impatient, indolent girls, who seemed to make no connection between the informality of tonight's rehearsal and the stress-wrought spectacle which they would be expected to enact starting on the fifteenth of the month.

The ballet mistress was beginning to lose patience with them all, and she put her weight upon the banister at the edge of the stage, her hand lifting to hide her eyes – a picture of exasperation and disappointment. "These dancers are a disgrace," she muttered aloud to no one in particular, but loudly enough so that they all could hear. "Everyone will demand their money back on opening night."

Giry was overcome with exhaustion from constant practice and, despite her passion for her craft, felt no desire to continue straining her already aching limbs. The characteristically melodramatic words of the ballet mistress had no effect on her. On the contrary, she found them a bothersome irritation, and she rolled her eyes towards the ceiling, exasperated.

As she did so, a flicker of light from far above caught her attention, and she paused, squinting.

Another girl plucked at her skirts, hoping to catch her attention and bring it back to rehearsal before the ballet mistress noticed and had further cause to complain. However, Giry simply batted at the girl's hand carelessly and took another step towards the curtains, peering up into the darkness of the riggings and rafters.

The maze of rope bridges and corridors was perfectly still and silent, almost completely shadowed in darkness from her eyes, as the illumination from the stage below wasn't enough to reach so high. Giry felt a slight sinking in the center of her chest, and though the other girl was whispering nervously to her, "Quick, before she sees," she couldn't drag her eyes away from the bleak rafters, feeling that if she were even to blink, she would miss something.

And surely enough, a second or two later, a rope, hanging down from a banister, seemed to have been touched by something – very faintly – it shifted, swaying a bit in a nonexistent breeze.

Giry drew in her breath sharply, and it seemed that the cause of the motion must have heard the sound of her dismay – the invader, creeping and sneaking along in the rafters like a cat, twitched suddenly, and her eyes were drawn to a narrow corridor built along the interior wall of the domelike opera. It was almost impossible to see – but as she squinted harder, she could make out the dim outline of a boyish figure, pressed back against the wall and bowed down, and she couldn't help but think of a cat crouched in the middle of a road, too petrified to move as a speeding carriage barreled towards it.

"Mademoiselle Giry!"

The shriek of the ballet mistress's voice snapped Giry's attention away from the figure, and, startled, she whirled and looked at the older woman.

"Perhaps you do not value my counsel enough to favor me with your attention while I attempt to instruct you? Perhaps you feel that your dancing is satisfactory as it is and needs no further improvement?" The ballet mistress's chin was lifted haughtily, her lips pursed. "If you truly feel you are sufficiently prepared for opening night, perhaps you are wasting your time here. I give you leave to go, little mademoiselle, and if you change your mind and decide that my teaching is worthwhile after all, feel free to attend tomorrow's rehearsal."

Such thinly-veiled commands were not lost on Giry, and cursing violently in her mind, she murmured apologies and turned to go. As she made her way towards the edge of the stage, she cast another final glance up at the rafters – but it was in vain, for now the corridor was empty: the intruder had fled.

* * *

Giry pushed the pin back into the coil of hair at the base of her skull with an unusual strength, and, satisfied that it was in place, arranged her hands in her lap once again. "How would you like me to pose today?" she asked, without looking at Erik.

"With your head turned to the left again, please. You have a wonderful profile."

She nodded and obeyed, moving her eyes even further to the left, fixing her gaze on the dripping stone wall in the distance. Normally she would have flushed slightly; even with her firm resolve, she could not help but feel flattered by Erik's occasionally ridiculous compliments, for he gave them so infrequently that when one was bestowed upon her she knew that he was being very sincere. However, her mind was still very far away, replaying over and over again the memory of the figure she had seen creeping through the rafters during rehearsal the previous day. He, as well, seemed somehow grave, and unsettled, as though he knew of what she was thinking and couldn't bring himself to raise the topic.

Over the past month or two, Erik had begun to overcome his shyness around her, and after much deliberation had gained the courage necessary to ask her to pose for him.

"My drawings are empty," he had said, looking at the papers scattered across his desk in disdain: the battered old desk Giry had managed to push down the hallway towards the lock door, from one of the old offices that was no longer in use. With only the thousands of candles, the shabby furniture, and the cold formations of rock and stone and iron, he had soon run out of subjects to sketch. He refused to draw any of his memories. There were no drawings of his mother.

Then one day, he seemed atypically quiet, as though mentally dancing around an idea he was too uncertain to voice. At last Giry had lost patience with him and asked him what was on his mind—and, obediently, he had made his request, which was simply that Giry sit for him from time to time so that he could draw her. "I've never drawn a person before."

"Really?" she had asked, surprised. "Not even yourself? You have a mirror, you could try a self-portrait."

She had regretted the suggestion as soon as she had made it, but refused to show it on her face. Erik did own a mirror—she had brought it down for him, naively—but he kept it quite far away and never seemed to look into it; and Giry had the sneaking suspicion from the cloth that always remained on the floor below it that when she was not there, Erik kept it covered.

Similarly, he had given no response to her proposition, but seemed to flinch beneath his mask. The papier mache, made to fit the form of his face exactly, gave little indication of the deformities it concealed; it showed with smooth outlines and subtle curves the way he might have looked, while revealing enough of his eyes and lips to maintain that it was not a costume mask—it served a purpose and was meant to hide terrible secrets.

The chamber of the catacombs had become flooded with portraits of Giry. When she walked through alone, she preferred to keep her eyes on the watery floors so that she did not have to look at them. It wasn't a question of his skill – for one who had done little more than scratch images in the dirt with twigs (prior to his gifts of heavy paper and drawing utensils), the portraits were remarkably accurate and lifelike. They characterized with remarkable honesty Giry's pointed chin, her large, wary eyes, her small, pinkish lips. It was more the fact that his skill was too great, that at times he made her look too beautiful. It was admiration for her normality, she knew; despite her flaws he likely thought her, in his own dispassionate way, the most beautiful woman in the world, simply due to the fact that she had shown him kindness, the fact that she saw him every day,_continued_ to come and see him.

Giry was most alarmed by his use of the tools with which she provided him – he used sticks of charcoal to create bold, sweeping lines, filling them with lead-tinted shadows, and once she was able to provide him with pastel chalks and colored pencils, the drawings of her came to life. The tatty velvet of one of her old coats would look so much like velvet that she would reach out to touch it, surprised when her fingers came away stained with violet grease. Her hair swept past her face like hills in autumn, her eyes gleamed like pools of pale water, and her skin flushed very faintly just over her cheekbones.

Giry felt shame when she looked at her own exaggerated beauty, so much more evident than in real life; she felt shame to see portraits which exaggerated her standard prettiness and made her seem infinitely more striking, portraits which were created by a man who had to wear a mask even in the darkness of his own dungeons.

But lately, Erik was becoming more and more dissatisfied with his work. His rapid improvement led him to become bored once over with his drawings.

Indeed, now, as he stood creating yet another portrait of her, the back of the easel all she could see of it at present, a look of displeasure seemed to have become a permanent fixture in his eyes. Giry finally moved her eyes away from the wall, without moving her chin, and studied him while he was too busy to study her. (And she noticed now that the trousers, shirt, and waistcoat he was wearing, like all the rest of the clothing she had given him, was becoming threadbare and constrictive. When she looked more closely she saw a tiny hole growing in the cavity beneath his arm, and another near the waist of the trousers. It seemed that providing him with food on a regular basis and removing much of the stress from his daily life had inspired a sudden growth spurt, and he was finally catching up to his age, developing the body of a man rather than a boy.)

Aloud, Erik mused in disappointment, "You look far too still in this one."

"Too still?" she repeated, forgetting the matters of his clothing and of yesterday's incident for the moment.

Erik looked at her then, his eyes slit and speculative under his mask, and it seemed that he as well was too focused on the process of art to remember his hesitation. He was no longer afraid to look her in the eye; on the contrary, his eyes often became daring, demanding contact with her own at times when she, having been raised in a society governed by manners and laws of propriety, was used to looking away. He now regarded her with the critical eye he reserved for when she posed – an eye that made her feel somehow imperfect, not up to standards that she knew nonetheless he wasn't cultured enough to have.

"You aren't so still," he said. "Not in reality. In fact, you seem alive with movement, all the time. You fidget constantly – your fingers are always moving, at the very least."

Giry felt embarrassed to realize that it was the truth.

"I want to draw you as you truly are," he murmured, more to himself than to her. "I don't know if such a thing is possible, but I'd like to attempt it." And then all of a sudden he seemed to remember his uncertainty again, and he moved his eyes back down to the drawing, his posture sagging a bit. "Mademoiselle Giry," he began in a wilted voice, "you are a dancer, are you not? You dance for the Opera?"

"I do," she responded, keeping her fingers absolutely still. She watched him now, feeling herself bristling.

"I have never seen you dance," he lied.

It was so easy to tell that he was lying, even without having caught him in the rafters. Instead of addressing the subject directly, she continued to play along as though unaffected. "Of course you haven't. I don't exactly trust my ballet slippers to survive the environment in these catacombs."

Erik seemed to be thinking intensely, and on the little table next to his easel he began to sift through his older sketches of her. In each of them she as well seemed to have matured, and as the drawings progressed her face became less childish, more womanly, her body less awkward and more graceful. Erik had not yet grown more talented at concealing his guilt, and though he tried passionately to hide it she could hear in his voice the note of a child who knows he has done wrong and hopes to evade punishment. "Forgive me for being so presumptuous, mademoiselle, but I would ask a favor of you. Would it be very inconvenient for you to dance for me, from time to time?"

"Dance for you?" she repeated, startled. "Here?"

"The floor in the sitting room," he began, for he had begun to refer to certain chambers as the sitting room, the dining room, and so forth, "is quite level. Level enough for you to dance on, don't you think?"

"Well – I suppose –"

"It would be so marvelous to sketch you in motion," he said softly, and his voice sounded unexpectedly sad, sad enough to make her destroy her pose and turn to look at him, feeling as though she had been stricken. "It would be wonderful. It would be like going to the Opera, like being able to go. Or like having the Opera perform for me – only for me." He set the piece of charcoal down on the rim of his easel, his long, thin fingers coming away stained with gray. "You_would_ be able to dance for me, mademoiselle – wouldn't you?"

Giry nodded her head mutely. She found herself unable to refuse; no favor seemed too great to grant him. Though he had begun to occupy his days with other things than drawing, such as writing and reading and, most consistently, absorbing himself in music, it seemed there was never enough for him to do. He always sought more things to bury himself in, and if dancing for him and allowing him to sketch her movements would please him, she wasn't capable of refusing him that pleasure.

"Of course I would," she said quietly.

She did not talk to him about having seen him in the rafters. For the rest of the evening she couldn't look him in the eyes; every time she did, they were too filled with sadness, having been able to glimpse what the Opera was like and then having reminded himself that he would never be able to see it.

* * *

Once she danced for him the first time, he continually requested that she dance again, that she show him nearly every dance she had ever learned. Initially she felt remarkably embarrassed, dressed in her ballet skirt and slippers and dancing in the silence of the catacombs, with only the sound of her soles sweeping against the stone as accompaniment – but Erik scoffed at her bashfulness, and it became easy to forget such paltry self-consciousness.

She saw herself in tiny lines, in little pencil drawings of a long-haired girl in a bodice, tutu, and slippers – she saw herself en pointe, in first position, third, her arms spread, her feet arched, her back perfectly straight. She saw her coltish legs, her bent fingers, her small ears, her downturned gaze – the laces of her slippers, the sashes about her waist, the ribbons in her hair – the way her skirts puffed bell-like above her knees.

She saw all these things as though with new eyes and it seemed that all the drawings and paintings of her seated, of her draped on a sofa, became somehow null – inapplicable, irrelevant, empty of meaning. It seemed that she did not exist in any other way.

* * *

It was not her clumsiness this time but the cruelty of fate, the slippery surfaces of the rocks, the darkness in Erik's realm that prevented proper sight. On the day after her eighteenth birthday, when coming to visit Erik, Giry tumbled down an incline of stone and rock and found herself in a heap in the shallow water – in addition to crushing her leg beneath her, her head had knocked against the rocks on the left bank and she had lost consciousness.

Erik found her shortly afterwards. She could not remember much of the incident – the intense pain in her right ankle and shin was enough to cloud her senses and make her feel as though lingering in a dream – but she remembered his worry behind the mask, the fear in his eyes, the anger. She remembered the feeling of floating, being carried in his arms, and then, being deposited, gently, being laid onto a sofa in a dressing room in the Opera – but by the time she opened her eyes and began to regain consciousness, he was gone and others were hurrying in, shocked by her state.

As it turned out, a number of the bones inside her right ankle had been displaced and fractured by the intensity of her fall. They would heal, surely enough, but the doctors insisted to her that the injury was more serious than she had expected – it would be nearly impossible, even once it healed, to walk without the aid of a cane, let alone to dance properly.

As soon as she was able to walk at all, Giry came down to Erik's chambers and, as he watched silently, destroyed all the drawings that he had made of her in her ballet slippers – all the drawings of her spinning through the air and balanced precariously on the perch of her toes. Now_they_ were the ones empty of sense, now_they_ seemed cruelly irrelevant.

"You were wrong," she said to him afterwards, her voice devoid of anything beyond fatigue, weariness. It was so difficult to walk, leaning all her weight upon a thin wooden cane.

"I was," he said. His voice was childish in its sorrow. "You_are_ still, after all."

* * *

_To be continued._

Feedback is more than welcomed!


	6. Part Six

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Notes:_ I want to thank everyone again for their patience and for their wonderful support and reviews. I'm sorry I haven't been putting up chapters as frequently as I used to, but I'm going to try to improve that in the near future. Additionally, though I forgot to say so last time, thank you to **Pleading Eyes** and **Dimac99** for pointing out things that might have been construed as mistakes – for all I know, they could have been – although I wasn't really thinking of specific ages in mind, and I did have a plan for why Giry is named Giry even prior to her marriage. It flatters me so much that readers are so attentive!

_Part Six_

Giry was beginning to grow accustomed to the cane, but not to the life to which she was resigned following her accident. After losing her art, her dancing, it seemed that everything else paled in its appeal. She became more careless about her appearance, and would leave her hair tied in a long tail down her back rather than pin it up or arrange it with ornaments and clips, as did the other dancers – she lost all feelings of obligations to those girls, those flighty creatures with their gossip and giggling. She no longer tried even occasionally to hold up empty conversations of endless chatter with them, and although technically her period of recovery had ended, she no longer made an appearance at their rehearsals only to sit by the sidelines and watch what she could no longer do.

The time that she had previously spent on the stage, in the dressing rooms, in the mirrored dance halls, she now spent below the surface of the earth, shrouded in darkness by Erik's side. She had no reason to stay above the ground in the daytime – the light of the sun, streaming through the windows, had begun to feel cold to her.

She would sit quietly on Erik's three-legged divan (a stack of books held up the unsupported corner) and watch him at his desks. Silences were comfortable between the two of them, as neither felt an obligation to talk when there was no need to do so. With her hands folded on the head of the cane beside her legs, she would watch him at his sketches and designs, or she would listen as he played beautiful symphonies, his talents growing daily, on the ancient violin. At times, if she asked, he would read to her, passages from books she had once owned but which she had presented to him in the past, and which he now presented, in his mournful, resonant voice, back to her.

He was surprisingly sympathetic to her pain, though he said nothing of it. Instead he showed his sympathy wordlessly, by creating special pathways out of the rock and stairs for her to walk, pathways that would not be so awkward or perilous. He would offer her his hand when she seemed to lose her balance, when she winced from leaning too hard on her destroyed ankle.

Giry, in turn, never spoke of the day upon which she had fallen, though her mind had been turning over the events following her accident continuously. Like the time she had spotted Erik creeping through the ropes and corridors in the rafters of the Opera, she found herself unable to stop thinking about it.

She had fallen, and had drifted in and out of consciousness – in such a state, nothing had been clear, and now, in memory, it remained obscured. However, she knew that somehow, when Erik had come upon her in a fainted heap, he had lifted her and carried her through the catacombs and back into the light – she remembered a glimpse of his face while lying on the sofa in the Opera dressing room, shortly before he had disappeared and she had been found by the dancers and seamstresses. But he had been there nonetheless; he did not know where she kept the keys to the locked doors leading to the surface, but somehow, without those keys, he had succeeded in bringing her into the light, into the rooms behind the Opera Populaire.

For the first time, she was more fragile than he was: she was at his mercy, and somehow, that comforted her. It was only now that her life had come tumbling down upon her – now that she had to rely on someone else, on a piece of wood, to walk – that she found him strong. It was only now, when she looked upon his darkened face, upon the sad curve of his lips, the hollow brightness of his eyes, that she felt herself weak by comparison. The increase in her time spent with him was not simply for reassurance, for company; it was because, in his shadow, she felt his strength and it filled her with the will to breathe, to carry on.

* * *

"Please," begged Celeste, her fingers tightly gripping Giry's free hand. "All the girls are so worried about you. Even Madame – oh, please, just come for a little while. The rehearsal is almost over as it is – you wouldn't have to be there for very long."

In the shadows of the corridor behind the stage, a pale, distant light was thrown upon her small face, and the layers of tulle which gave volume to her skirt glowed whiter than they truly were. She looked like an angel, but though her voice was sweet and sympathetic, her large brown eyes, to which Giry looked suddenly, were full of pity. They scanned Giry's face with the slow, gentle precision of a doctor inspecting a wound, of a mother looking over her child, and it made her feel as though her stomach were being twisted into a knot.

"Celeste," she began quietly, uncertainly. It was always so difficult to make excuses for herself.

"Nothing you can say will dissuade me." Celeste loosened her grip, but took Giry's hand and stroked the back of it with her fingers. "Even my brother is here today, and you know how rare that is. He has come to see _you_, you know. He was always so impressed by you, when he came to see the shows."

Giry remembered Celeste's brother – it was difficult not to remember Briand Mortier, a young man whose eyes had always remained riveted upon her despite the fact that his younger sister was always dancing not so far from her side – but she couldn't keep the bitterness out of her voice. "And what are his reasons for coming now? He will not see me dance."

Celeste's eyes changed, though the pity remained. "Please," she said again. "He so wants to see you."

Though the music on the other side of the curtains – the dancing mistress would not be pleased by Celeste missing so much of the rehearsal, Giry knew – there was suddenly another person behind her, a presence bearing down against her back. Celeste's expression brightened, and Giry turned slightly to see a young man in the shadows, half illuminated; she recognized him immediately, having seen him at a number of performances and, as well, having danced with him at a number of Opera balls.

"Monsieur Mortier," she said, bowing her head. Though the sight of him pleased her, as always, she could not put any more life, or manners, into her greeting.

Briand's eyes, as always, seemed unable to move from her face, and he smiled slightly. He always seemed somehow higher than his station, as though he had been snatched from a noble cradle at birth and given to a family whose daughter was, of all things, a dancer. His hair was paler than hers, and straighter, always neatly tied back, and his clothes were always pressed; his hands were always clean. When he took her hand in his and bent to kiss it, she saw his fingernails gleam. But his cleanliness was not foppish, or vain; it was somehow sad, as though he knew he did not belong in his family and mourned it – as though he did all he could to achieve on his own what his birth had not allowed him.

"Mademoiselle Giry," he responded, and his smile was kind. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine, thank you."

Before she could say more, Celeste pressed her hand a final time, gave her brother an affectionate kiss on the cheek, and disappeared again through the curtains. Giry lowered her hand back to her cane, able to hear the dancing mistress scolding Celeste even from a distance. In Celeste's absence, Giry felt awkward; she swept her hand over her long skirt, ashamed of her injury even though Briand could not see it, even though he already knew. As she looked into his face she felt something in her chest sink, something overcome with sorrow. There was something in the way he looked at her, the way he was so quiet and courteous, that made her wilt – he was so inherently good, so mindful of every move she made, so awed by her. She felt unworthy of his goodness. "What brings you here today, monsieur? Have you come to watch the recital?"

"I have," he began, "but I admit that I had another more sinister motivation as well. I intended to ask you if you would be our guest for supper on Thursday evening – if you were to indulge us, my sister and I would be most pleased to have your company."

"Supper?" she repeated, finally lifting her eyes, and the word fell from her lips like a foreign term.

Briand nodded, and he seemed to have become shy: his fingers began to fidget at his waist. "We would be most pleased," he said again, more softly, and smiled. "I… _I_ would be pleased."

* * *

As she sat on the divan and watched as Erik tuned his violin (it flew out of tune at the lightest knock against a hard surface), it seemed there was a notably tense atmosphere in the air. He was able to ignore it at first, but she seemed overtaken by it, her eyes on her cane, her fingers, as always, drumming against the fabric of her skirts over her legs.

At last her silent, frustrated anxiety increased to the point where Erik could no longer ignore it – to the point where he nearly snapped one of the violin's strings. He put it down, turning to her, and his brow was furrowed. "You are not feeling well today," he said, his voice inferring, guessing.

She looked up, surprised by his voice. She gave his assumption a bit of consideration, but shook her head. "No. I feel fine. There is hardly any pain anymore."

"Then?" he simply said, almost irritated by the strangeness of her demeanor.

Giry realized that she would need to utilize her inherent honesty – she could not bring herself to keep secrets from him. Additionally, the fact that she had suddenly grown so much weaker – that he had grown so much stronger – led her sometimes to comply to his requests and demands unusually quickly. It was not that she feared him; only that she did not feel herself able to defy him. Meeting his eyes, she said, "I feel I might have something to confess to you."

Erik nodded his head, once, and waited. She thought she saw fear in his eyes, fear inspired by the seriousness of her tone, and it amused her; his strength faltered so easily.

"I have not spoken to you of Briand Mortier – he is Celeste's brother." She had spoken to him many times of the other girls in the ballet, and by this time he more or less knew them by name. "When he has time, Briand attends all the shows that the Opera puts on… and occasionally he attends rehearsals as well. He has taken very much of a liking to me."

"Has he?" Erik seemed to force himself to sound nonchalant, but his low voice was tinged with jealousy, that someone else would want to occupy Giry's time.

"He has." Giry felt suddenly hesitant about continuing; she felt certain that it was a mistake, though she knew that there was no possible way to avoid telling Erik the truth. There was something terrible about the situation, and the impending silence fell heavily upon her shoulders like a shawl made of iron links. "He invited me to his home for supper last night. He…" The words tasted strange on her tongue, but not necessarily unpleasant. "He told me that he wants me to marry him."

She did not look up. However, she may as well have; she could hear Erik's reaction perfectly and it surfaced in her mind as clearly as if it were one of his sketches, as precise as one of his paintings, more honest than life itself. He was still a moment, and then he reached for the case of his violin, putting the instrument inside and shutting the lid, almost too quickly – it made a snapping sound like a sheet hung out to dry in the wind. As though startled by the sound he drew his hands back immediately and let them rest in his lap, but they were tense, his fingers curled.

"And what did you say?" he asked finally, and to her surprise, his voice was not angry; it was heavy with something akin to resignment, to surrender.

Giry couldn't lift her eyes. "I told him I would."

"Do you love him?"

"I don't know."

"Do you want to marry him?"

The question seemed overly obvious, for she had already told him that she had accepted the proposal; but Erik was far more intelligent than that. She felt her cheeks burn slightly, not with shame, but with the feeling that somehow he had been able to look into her mind even without being able to look into her eyes.

Again unable to answer the question, she said instead, "I made up my mind as a child never to marry."

"Why?" He sounded bewildered by everything she was telling him, but riveted.

"I don't know. It seemed like a waste of time."

"Then why do you change your mind now?"

Giry opened her mouth to speak, but only a small sound escaped, the beginning of a sentence that she killed in the middle of its flight by closing her lips again. She had no proper answer to his questions, and she knew that lies would do no good – the truth was all that he would accept, and all that she would allow herself to offer him. "There is nothing else I can do with my life. All girls are intended to grow up and marry; I thought as a child that – I thought I would never have to marry, that I would be able to live only for my dancing, for the performance... but that is no longer the case." Her ankle stung suddenly.

Erik said nothing, but she could almost hear him tightening his lips, as well.

She felt frustrated with him, with his silence. "What else can I do? The Opera has been very kind to allow me to stay this long – they know as well as I do that my usefulness to them has ended. They humor me; they say that when my ankle is better I can return to dancing. But they know it will never be better." She felt an urge to throw her cane away from her suddenly, but instead she only gripped it more tightly. "Briand is very sympathetic to me. He understands my grief at having no further use to the world. He intends to take care of me now that I have lost my worth."

Still, Erik did not speak, and she found that she had run out of words. She looked up finally, slowly lifting her eyes from the damp stone. He continued to sit, his posture tense, a few strands of dark hair having fallen over the smooth plane of the mask. His eyes were pensive, his brow furrowed, and he seemed to be struggling internally.

"What, Erik?" she said finally, at a loss. "What would you have me do?"

"Your worth..." He stopped. "You have not lost your worth."

Giry exhaled, a long, deep sigh.

"What will I do?" he asked then, devoid of any emotion in either direction, devoid of the helplessness that seemed to burn at his tongue like salt.

"I won't disappear," she told him, a tiny bit of desperation seeping into her voice; barely noticeable, but there nonetheless. "I will make sure that nothing happens to you. I'll make sure that you have what you need. And I will still see you – simply not as often as I do now."

"How often, then?" Erik turned his face away, but his eyes, visible through the holes in the mask, were suddenly full of bitterness. "I suppose you plan to marry him quite soon, so as not to inconvenience the Opera further. I have, I assume, a fortnight more of your time, before you go away? And then you will make visits to me once a week, for a short while, but they will dwindle, your visits, and soon it will be once a month. After a while you will not come at all." He lifted a hand then, and rubbed at the mask, seeming caught up in frustration of his own.

Giry felt weak, unable to fight this battle with him. She leaned back against the divan, closing her eyes wearily. "You know that isn't true."

"How do I know such a thing?" he asked harshly, with a sweeping gesture of his hand. "Once you have a husband and a home, you will no longer have any desire to spend your time in the dampness of this dungeon with me. I would not blame you." He lowered his hand, and his face seemed to follow it, his head bowing. "I blame only myself, for having thought otherwise."

She furrowed her brow, and said, questioningly, "What do you mean?" When he did not answer, she leaned forward. "Erik?"

He put his hands in his lap as though to keep them from acting without his permission. "You have no use," he repeated vaguely, perplexed. "Perhaps that is true, mademoiselle – perhaps to the world above you have no use. And nor do I." He looked at her with eyes that were wide and luminous, almost ablaze. "You have said so yourself – this is the only place for someone like me. But have you not become like me, now that you have lost all that, as you say, makes you useful, makes you appealing, to the world above the ground? Could this not be the only place for you as well?"

"You mean for me to stay here?" she asked softly. "Down here, with you?"

"I had hoped –" he began, and then cut himself off, shaking his head.

Giry realized, while looking at him, that she had become clouded by her level of familiarity with him – she had become oblivious to the fact that he was so impaired, so naïve, so utterly unaware of social convention. As she had been the only person, the only woman, ever to show kindness to him, he had somehow come to the conclusion that they could never separate again – that, although the love he felt for her was strictly platonic, familial, somehow she would end up staying with him for the rest of her days, to care for him, to protect him. The idea that she would willingly leave him was, to him, inconceivable.

Before she could rouse herself from her thoughts in order to make a reply, she heard him murmur under his breath, "I have grown so accustomed to your presence that I fear I will go mad without it."

Her left hand lingering on the cane, she covered her eyes with her right – they had begun to hurt all of a sudden. "You will not go mad."

"Oh?"

"You will forget me."

Erik looked at her with a face that seemed full of darkness. "Forget you," he repeated, his voice a hiss, dripping with disgust. "You think of me as a child, then? You think you are like a toy you can dangle in front of me for a time – a toy that, once removed, I won't miss in the least? You think I can survive without you, without anyone – utterly alone in the world?"

Giry lowered her hand. "You are only right to forget those who hurt you. I've told you so myself, though I never imagined that I would be guilty of the same sin. You must put them out of your mind, so they cannot continue to cause you pain. You don't remember your mother anymore, I'm sure – she must have been horrible to you. You have never drawn her face, not once, not even vague outlines of what she must have looked like. I think you must be right to have forgotten her. Your drawings of me will disappear and you will forget me, too – you would be right to forget me."

"No," he said, and he shook his head. He seemed feverish, bearing against his fever, but simultaneously, her mention of his mother had summoned chills. He rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, and she saw gooseflesh spring up on his arms. "No."

"I cannot live down here with you, Erik." She swallowed, her throat tight. "I cannot spend the rest of my life here."

"I know that," Erik said ruthlessly, and his hair became like a black curtain over his eyes. "It was wrong of me to expect you to make such a sacrifice."

"I did," she whispered. "I thought I would, for a time."

"Why?"

Giry felt insubstantial, as though she were about to melt into the fabric of the divan, about to evaporate into the dank air. "After my accident I nearly gave up. Besides my dancing I have had no strong tie to anything, and when I lost that, as well, I felt as though the one rope holding me to the earth had been severed. It would have been so easy to simply float away."

She shook her head. "You have been my one real accomplishment," she murmured, and she looked at him with eyes full of caring, full of maternal love. "My saving grace. I'm afraid I don't have the strength to take my own life, but after my accident it was merely the idea of abandoning you that kept me from such dark thoughts. I imagined your loneliness – I pictured your loneliness like these catacombs, like an immense darkness ready to swallow you up, and I could never allow such a thing to happen because of my own selfishness. I thought that if my life on the surface of the earth had come to such a terrible end, I could at least continue to care for you – I could do that, for you. But it seems that I am weaker than I thought. I cannot so easily tear myself away from the sun – given another chance at life in its light, I abandon the life I could have had in the darkness. I abandon you, knowing that your loneliness will grow to the point where it might consume you."

"You know – and still, you would leave me here?" Erik's voice was quiet. He was looking away from her, now the one unable to meet her eyes, and his own were obscured in shadows, his face hardened beneath the mask by grief and anger. His fingers danced along the edge of the case of his violin.

She was silent, and then said again, softly, "You would be right to forget me."

* * *

_To be continued._

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	7. Part Seven

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Notes: _Thank you to everyone who reviewed the last chapter; I was a bit worried about Briand. It's always a bit uncertain when a new character is introduced, especially one whom you know isn't going to last very long. I've done my best with him, in the short of amount of time that he's had, and I hope I've set things up properly for what's going to happen next. Thank you again -- I really do appreciate your reivews!

_Part Seven_

As it turned out, marriage was exactly as Giry had imagined it; following the elaborate procession of the wedding itself, which had taken place in a small chapel somewhat close to the Opera, everything seemed to settle into a comforting, inescapable calm, a calm in which the days seemed to melt together – so similar was one morning, one evening to the next. Briand, who worked at his father's shop, would leave promptly every morning and return home at the same time every evening.

However, Giry found this monotony soothing, much in the same way she had found her monotony with Erik soothing – it was a way to distract her thoughts, to keep her from thinking of her lost chances. Briand was courteous and kind, and he doted on her constantly; at times it was almost irritating, but for the most part, she enjoyed watching him. She, who had little experience with men, had less with gentlemen, and despite his humble breeding he carried himself with an air of gallant sophistication, a refinement that was as mild and unassuming as the pale glow of his eyes.

Additionally, his patience with her seemed to know no bounds, and for this Giry was grateful. Somehow he seemed able to sense that the internal pain caused by her accident was far greater than any physical pain she had so far endured, and so he never spoke of her injury aloud, nor of her history in the ballet. He was unendingly sensitive to her situation, particularly to her physical impediment, and he would slow his pace so that she could walk beside him and hold his arm.

She gave herself over to the life of marriage readily, more than eager to escape the constant torture of living in the dormitories of the Opera Populaire, where she had been forced constantly to watch the other girls in their nimble flight. Now that she was able to put them behind her, she did so with no misgivings.

* * *

Shortly before her wedding, she had gone to the cellars of the Opera to speak to Erik for the last time as an unmarried woman, and this time, he had not appeared immediately near the entrance in order to offer her his arm and help her down to the bowels of the catacombs. She walked alone, leaning heavily on her cane, navigating the twists and turns of the cold stone as easily as if she were recalling the features of a childhood friend, and before long she had come to find Erik. He was not drawing, or playing his violin, or scribbling away in a blank book; on the contrary, she almost missed him, he was so still and silent. Clearly he _had_ been practicing music, before he had heard her approaching – the moment her footsteps reached his ears, he had left the bow and violin abandoned on the desk, covering old sheets of music, and had raced across the chamber to perch on the rocks as quickly and silently as a shadow.

Upon sighting him, she had stopped, less startled than she likely should have been. As he tended to do whenever they spoke of unpleasant things, or when they quarreled, he sought to be as high above her as possible – he could not bear the possibility of looking her in the eye, and instead he roosted in the space between the boulders and the curved stone wall, hiding in the shelter of dank darkness. She had brought him more clothes the previous week, but he had not touched them until after she had left; now, the crimson of the shabby velvet coat caught a faint glint of the candlelight, and when she sought out his hands with her eyes, she saw them clutching his knees, almost covered by the too-long sleeves. Too big, she knew, was better than too small.

"Erik," she had said.

He said nothing and did not move. His eyes were invisible; he had bowed his head to crush the instinct of looking at her face, and his dark hair fell over the mask that covered his deformity.

"Erik, I will understand if you do not wish to speak to me." She pressed her body against his desk, leaning on it with care to take the weight off her leg. "I only wanted to tell you that my wedding takes place next week, and that there will be much to take care of between now and that time. I didn't want you to be frightened when I didn't come to visit you."

He was silent.

Giry swallowed, and the sound of her throat working angered her; it was louder than she had predicted. "I imagine you're still angry with me," she said softly. "I told you that I understand, and I do – I would not have you pretend to be civil to me, in order to satisfy my own guilt."

Again, he made no response, nor any gesture of having heard her; he was so motionless that she imagined he must be holding his breath, refusing to breathe if only to keep her from seeing the rise and fall of his shoulders.

"Erik," she said, and her voice was choked.

He was silent.

"Erik, if you don't tell me that you want me to return, I won't." She let her fingers shift over the edges of the music sheets, feeling their coarse corners pressing into her skin. Despite what he had said, her stillness did not extend to her hands; in moments of pain, of grief, she could never keep them from moving without her consent. "I need you to speak to me. If you say nothing, I can only assume that you – that you will never forgive me. And if that is true, then you have no further use of me. I have no desire to cause you more pain."

He was silent.

"Say something, please." She swallowed again. "Tell me that you want me to come back. Tell me that you need me. If you say nothing, I will know that you feel only hatred for me. If you say nothing, I will leave you alone, Erik, I will leave you in peace – I won't come to see you again."

He was silent.

She had not imagined this. She was very familiar with the desperation of his pride; though she couldn't imagine how it had been able to flourish, constantly stripped from him as it had been in his early life, it seemed stronger than any of his other characteristics, any of his other emotions. It seemed to dominate him with an iron hand, even when his weakness or his need would have him act otherwise. But now, when she, his only friend and caretaker, was saying to him that she would never come back, that she would never see him again if he did not speak – it was inconceivable to her that he would not swallow his hurt, his indignity, and tell her that he wanted her to stay.

Her throat began to close, and the sensation that she hated, the sensation of being on the verge of tears, overtook her with a vengeance. She felt as though she would fly apart at any moment, as though if she didn't hold herself upright she would crumble and shatter on the cobbles beneath her shoes. In that moment she would have done anything for him – if he had only spoken, she would have obeyed any command. If he had told her to break off her engagement with Briand, if he had told her that he wanted her to spend the rest of her life sitting in the graveyard of his catacombs and telling him that she loved him, she would have done it.

"Erik, please," she whispered, "please, tell me that you need me."

He said nothing.

When she left it was suddenly almost impossible to walk, and both legs seemed to fail her – her body seemed as heavy as if she were trailing a ball and chain behind her. At the very corner of the passageway, just as she was about to leave him out of the range of her sight, she paused and turned around, wiping at her eyes with the side of her hand, peering up into the shadows of the boulders.

It was almost impossible to see, but a soft noise carried over to her where her footsteps might have muffled it, and somehow hearing it made her eyes work harder. Erik remained on his perch, huddled almost up against the ceiling, but he had removed his mask and in his carelessness it had slipped over the edge of the boulders and slid silently to the stone below him; and now, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, suddenly he was crying, nearly inaudible sobs wracking his chest and shaking his shoulders with the force of their anguish. The sound itself was only that, only the incarnation of grief, the desperate tears and his attempts to keep her from hearing them.

* * *

Giry did not return to see Erik after that; instead, she forced down the longing to go back, the unexpected hole that seemed to form in her when she did not see him, and she busied herself with matters of her marriage. The wedding was a small affair, as was the small house on the edge of town that she and Briand moved their things into, but it helped her to distract her mind and to keep her from thinking of things that could no longer be helped.

Almost exactly six months after her wedding, a change took place in Giry, manifesting itself first in a sudden sickness that seemed to consume her entire body, making her head and her bones ache and refusing to allow her the slightest form of nourishment without forcing her to eject it from her body moments later. Briand called for a doctor, who inspected Giry and informed her with an affectionate pat on the hand that she was with child, and that she seemed in spite of her weakness to be in good condition.

The moment she heard the diagnosis, Giry felt a bizarre sensation in her stomach that made her feel as though something were tugging at her innards and trying to make her collapse in upon herself. Part of it was inspired by joy, she knew; she had never wanted to marry and thus had never planned on having children, but now that she knew she would have one, she found, with much surprise, that she felt the same wonder and anticipation that she was certain all other expecting mothers must feel. However, the pleasure was mixed with fear, not so much fear of the physical dangers of childbirth but fear of the idea that, once again, she would have the responsibility of someone else's life in her hands. She tried as hard as possible not to think of Erik, to keep him from her mind so that she did not become consumed by doubt and grief, but now that she was going to have a child, she couldn't help but feel that she would be losing him all over again – she would be saving someone, shielding and nurturing a life, and dedicating herself wholeheartedly to that person in Erik's absence. It was something that she didn't feel able to do all over again.

Unsurprisingly, Briand was delighted by the news, and he doted upon Giry even more than he had before, certain that the moment he turned his back she would break. His instinct to protect her was almost fierce, unusually so, considering his typically quiet and composed demeanor; he would walk beside her on the streets like he was guarding her, and refuse to allow her to let go of his hand, even for a moment. Giry was unaccustomed to such attention, and whenever it showed itself she couldn't help but smile like her mother had smiled and feel her cheeks burning like roses.

One evening when she sat near the window of their sitting room, attempting with clumsy fingers to knit together a garment for a very small child (a project that was giving her a great degree of frustration), she happened to glance up from her work to look across the room.

Briand had been sitting in his armchair, reading through an old leather-bound book, but he had lowered it and set it in his lap, and now he sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed intently on her as she worked. His typical composure seemed to have melted away, leaving the expression in his eyes bare for her to see, and it startled her; it was nothing terrible, nothing like disapproval, or disdain, emotions with which he never regarded her, even when she forgot to sign her letters as Madame Mortier and put her maiden name instead. On the contrary, it was an open look, a look that went deep into the pupils of his eyes and seemed to come out through his soul – a look of pure love. It was such that it darkened his eyes' shade of blue, and even the light of the lamps could not salvage it and chase the love out of it.

As though startled from his reverie, he gave a small jerk and his eyes seemed to let down their guard, allowing some of the light from the candles to infiltrate their defenses and lighten their color once more. But the look did not entirely go away, even when he smiled at her, and she thought that it never really did go away, so long as she looked into his eyes.

* * *

On a snowy afternoon in December, Giry's labor pains began, but they were hardly severe; in fact, the entire process of labor cost her very little and left her surprised but unharmed. Briand sent for the doctor immediately (as he had nine months earlier) and within a few hours, Giry gave birth to a daughter – a tiny, blushing child so beautiful that Giry could think of no name good enough for her. Therefore, she allowed Briand to come up with a name, and he decided to name their daughter after his deceased mother, Marguerite.

Little Meg, as her parents came to call her, was a dear and daring child. Her hair was not autumn leaves, like her mother's, but nor was it golden wheat, like her father's – it was something in between, just as her eyes were neither gray and silent nor blue and warm.

Her face was pretty and sweet, and her body dainty and strong. As soon as she could struggle out of her mother's arms, she began attempting to crawl up stairs and underneath tables, and she put her delicate fingers into everything, from Giry's hair ornaments to Briand's lukewarm soup. As soon as she could speak, she couldn't stop, for it was as though the first word she learned was a password that allowed everything else she had been wanting to say to spill out of her.

And though Giry had not been expecting it at all, all she could feel whenever she looked at her daughter was love – the kind of love that had always been strange and inexplicable to her, the kind of love that looking at Erik would sometimes make her feel somewhere just beneath her ribcage, though she had never been able to identify it before. Meg occupied her thoughts every hour of every day, even when the infant was sleeping, even when Briand was taking her for a stroll so that Giry could rest alone. Only one thing disturbed her – at times she would sit by the window with Meg in her arms, and looking out at the way the clouds swept around the sun, all she could think was that however much Meg needed her, someone who needed her just as much lived and breathed without her care.

* * *

Meg was not quite three years old when Briand began to develop a habitual cough, but despite Giry's urgings he refused to see a doctor. It seemed that his instincts to care for Giry and Meg did not extend to himself, for though his cough worsened and his skin began to grow thin and pale, he consistently brushed off any comments of concern.

As time passed, his symptoms only worsened, and whatever sickness held him in its grasp, it began to affect his mind as well as his body. He started staying inside when Giry and Meg went for their Sunday walks, claiming physical discomfort though Giry could see fear in his drawn eyes. Unable to read for long periods of time, as his head would begin to throb, he would simply fall asleep in the sitting room while Giry played with Meg on the carpet. His stomach began refusing certain kinds of food, and if Giry mistakenly allowed forbidden ingredients into his dishes, Briand would be unable to get out of bed for a week, and once or twice she even spied blood in the vomit that stained the basin in the washroom.

Soon he was not able to go to work at all, and though his father tried to support him for as long as he could, Briand and Giry began to suffer from their lack of income, and it seemed that before long they would not be able to afford their home any longer. However, Giry never voiced her concerns to Briand, so worried was she for his health and how her own fears might have affected him.

* * *

It was eight o'clock in the evening when she, and Meg, heard a strange thud from the upstairs. Meg, who was sitting on Giry's lap and playing with a small lamb, looked up from her toy, her attention distracted by the unusual sound, and Giry sighed slightly. At times Briand, while sitting in bed, would drift off in the middle of something, and whatever he had been working on would fall to the floor as he dozed open-mouthed. Giry whispered assurances to Meg and stood, setting her daughter down on the chair where she had sat.

"I'm going to go upstairs and check on your father," she said, tucking a strand of Meg's long hair behind her ear. "Sit and be good until I come back, all right?"

"All right, Mama." Meg nodded, but seemed to sulk, disappointed that her mother would not bring her up to see her father.

As she ascended the stairs, Giry felt overcome with fatigue, and the old pain in her leg returned for a brief moment after she bumped it against the banister. Her life, she knew, was better than she deserved; she had a husband, a good husband, and a daughter whom she loved; but at times she felt overcome, as though something weighed upon her more heavily than she could allow. It took so much effort to care for Briand, now that he was so ill (yet still, still refused to let her call the doctor, even for a brief examination), and for Meg simultaneously. But she did not resent Briand, and it was with a kind tenderness in her heart that she took care of him – she thought, though she rarely let herself think of it, that it might even be love. It might even be love that she had developed for him, the sort of love that a woman was supposed to have for her husband, and not the grateful, friendly kind of warmth that she had felt for him when he had proposed to her.

He was ill now, and she could see it, but she knew it would pass, it would lift itself away from him and give him back his vitality and spirit – for now, she could bear his pallor, his voice weakened by the cough, his fingers made to tremble by something that lived inside him and fought desperately to steal him away. For now, she could bear it. Whenever he looked at her, no matter his exhaustion or discomfort, his eyes still filled with that look, that flood of real, pure love.

When she reached the top of the stairs and opened the door that led to their bedroom, she felt sure in her heart that she could carry on, with that knowledge.

As she had suspected, Briand was asleep, his head turned on the pillow, his pale hair – even paler these days than it had been before, but perhaps that was her imagination – escaping to lay flat across his forehead. His eyes, closed, were encircled with shadows, and his lips were dry, slightly ajar. One of his hands lay across his stomach, his fingers half-open as though they had been holding something, and the other hand drooped off the edge of the bed, a book open face-down on the floor below it.

It had been a book this time, to cause the noise. Giry crossed the room quietly and bent at the waist, picking up the book and closing it properly, trying to straighten the pages that had been creased by the fall, and then she set it on the night-table beside Briand's half of the bed.

She moved closer and sat down softly beside him, moving his hand to place it on his stomach, over the other hand. Then she leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss against his cheekbone.

Somehow it was in that gesture, that tiny, momentary touch – the realization that Briand was suddenly, inexplicably gone. His flesh was still warm, but there was a chill beneath that heat, like a fire flourishing on dirt that has already been frozen by winter, and his eyes, closed, did not flutter even when her lips touched his skin. When she pulled back from his face she sat silently and looked at him, her mind racing but her eyes and fingers, for once, perfectly still. She had been wrong, then, and so had he: the disease burning inside of him had been stronger than either of them had surmised, and it had chosen not to let him go.

She reached over and draped her hand across his two, her palm against the backs of his fingers.

And though she didn't know exactly where the words came from, she said softly, "I'm glad." She tried to fight against the sudden constriction in her chest. "I couldn't bear to see you like that for much longer."

She moved her free hand up to his face to gently push the hair from his forehead, and as she leaned down she pressed her eyes tightly shut, tears beading underneath her lashes, so that she did not have to see his face. She kissed his brow, her hand resting on his cheek, and whispered, "Good night, my darling."

* * *

_To be continued._

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	8. Part Eight

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Notes_: I keep confusing myself with this new system of updating, thinking I've uploaded and then realizing that I haven't, so hopefully this is successful. Thank you again to all the wonderful people who read and review, and I hope that this story continues to be interesting to at least a couple of you out there. I really am trying.

_Part Eight_

"Have things changed much?"

Giry cringed, finding that the sound of her own voice was strangely hollow: it was vague, and indistinct. It was as though she were reading words off a sheet of paper, and it seemed that Celeste knew it, though she did nothing to call attention to it. For Celeste too was grieving, even now; the death of Briand, her own brother, had caused her to abandon her position in the Opera for two months so that she could mourn away her heartache, and although she had by now returned to the dance corps, there was still a certain changed quality in her posture. No longer were her shoulders straight and light – she seemed weighted down, now, as though her wings had been burdened with weights.

They sat on a settee in a dressing room on the first floor, where Celeste had chosen to take Giry so that others could not interrupt them. Giry had already made all the necessary arrangements with the managers of the Opera Populaire, and having walked in on the exchange, Celeste had spirited Giry away afterwards to discuss this bizarre decision with her. The two had maintained contact during Giry's marriage to Briand, but due to Celeste's constant obligation to the Opera and Giry's preoccupation with caring for her family, they had not seen as much of one another as they might have hoped.

Celeste held onto Giry's hand in her customary way, the fingers of both her own hands wrapped tightly around Giry's as though the two of them were the best of friends. It was not an insincere gesture; she was simply, Giry knew, uninformed.

"You could say they have," Celeste said, nodding her head. There were no rehearsals scheduled for that day – she was not dressed in her skirts and slippers, but in a respectable dark blue dress, and her pale hair was pulled away from her face to show the new lines around her eyes. "It's been five years since you've set foot inside this place, hasn't it? Some of the girls have gone, and others have come to take their places; there are new singers, new musicians, even new maids." She said, almost sympathetically, "Of course things wouldn't be quite as you left them."

Giry nodded and lowered her eyes. She knew that she, too, had developed a new severity to her features, a new sadness in the setting of her mouth.

The cane was leaning against the edge of the settee, and the hand of Giry's not gripped by Celeste was being held absently by Meg, who stood like a bored doll in her pale blue dress, her long hair in disarray, her toy lamb dangling from her other hand. She had never seen the Opera Populaire, save from the outside and from a distance, and while being inside it was quite an adventure, she did not much like being forced to stand in one room while her mother had a long and earnest talk with one of the adult dancers. If she had had things her way, Giry knew, Meg would be running in and out of every room, and poking her head into places she had no right to be in – despite all her exceptional qualities, Meg was still as curious as any other four-year-old girl.

Celeste gave Meg a pat on the head, as sorry for the little girl as she was for her mother, and for herself. "What are your plans for Marguerite?" she asked then, more quietly, as though somehow this would keep Meg from hearing. "If you wish to come and live in the Opera's apartments again – if you want to spend _all_ your time helping the girls with their dancing – what will you do with her? Who will watch her?"

"She will be no trouble." Giry shook her head. "I have no intention of letting her run wild behind my back. She has expressed quite an interest in dancing," and at this the corners of her mouth turned down in unspoken displeasure, "so I will let her dance with the other girls, at least for the time being."

Celeste nodded, and put a smile on her face, her eyes brightening only slightly with a hope that she directed both at Meg and at Giry. "She's such a pretty little girl, and so graceful – I feel certain that she will be a lovely dancer, just as agile as ever you were." She lifted her eyes and saw the look on Giry's face, and her smile faded slightly. "You should not be so disapproving – she may well be a great talent, and you would do wrong to keep her from such a life because of the disaster that befell you."

Though the words may have been harsh spoken by another, they were gentle and honest coming from Celeste, and Giry exhaled tiredly, nodding her head in resignment. "We shall see," she only said. She looked down at Meg, and took her hand from her daughter's to stroke her hair briefly.

Celeste studied Giry. "Why," she began as though the question had just come to her, "Why have you decided to dispose of my brother's name?"

Again, the question was not harsh, but rather inquisitive and uncertain. Giry had already explained her intention to return to her original name, though she could comprehend Celeste's difficulty in comprehending it. Celeste, despite the fact that she was a dancer, was well-schooled in propriety, like Giry – but as they both knew, Giry often chose to diverge from what was considered done.

"It would remind me too much of him," she said briefly. "If I am to begin my life again, I feel I can only do so if I leave behind everything tying me to the life I attempted to lead."

Celeste asked softly, "Is that why you've come?"

Giry didn't answer.

"I thought —" Celeste began, and then fell silent. A moment later, she continued, and now her voice was even softer than before, "I thought you wanted never to see this place again."

"I can only wish it were as simple as that," Giry said smiling, but her smile was sad, and bitter. "You would be the first to admit, Celeste, that Briand was never wealthy, and that I always had to endure secondhand clothing from the older dancers; together we were not much better than apart. And now that Briand is gone, I fear for Meg. I fear that without a father, and with me able to do nothing more than sew and cook and clean – I fear that if something were to happen to me, she would have absolutely nothing in the world to fall back upon. At least if we remain here, under the shelter of the Opera, she is to have _some_ security in her life."

Celeste took a long breath, and nodded. "I see." She chose her words carefully, eyeing Giry sideways. "I can see the reasoning in your decision, and I respect your desire to make certain that Meg is looked after – but what about you?"

"What about me?" Giry repeated, turning away, for she knew Celeste's purpose.

"You could scarcely look any of us in the eye, after your accident. You dragged yourself to the rehearsals for a while and each time you looked about to break into a thousand pieces. And now," Celeste said softly, "you expect to be able to teach the younger dancers? To be reminded constantly of your own misfortune?"

Giry spoke firmly. "I will swallow my pride, for Meg's sake."

Celeste opened her mouth to respond, her brows furrowed, but at that moment there was a long, low creak that seemed to come not from the hallway or the ceiling above them, but from somewhere inside the wall to their backs. Both fell silent and turned around suddenly, and when Giry looked back at Celeste she saw a petrified expression on her friend's face.

She smiled, a genuine smile of amusement. "Celeste, you look as though you've seen a ghost! It must only be someone in the next room."

Celeste turned to her and smiled weakly in return, but still looked rattled, and her hands gripped Giry's more tightly than before. "I find it funny that you say such a thing. You know, rumors have begun to circulate among the dancers of just that very thing."

"Of what? A ghost?" Giry shook her head. "That is another reason I find myself so hesitant to let Meg dance – it seems that dancers somehow inherit a frivolity that accompanies them both on the stage and off it."

"Oh, it isn't frivolity," Celeste said solemnly. "If I were not a few years older than the smaller girls I would be inclined to join them in their gossip. You were not here to see any of it – it began at least a year after you left, I feel sure – but every once in a while something strange will happen, someone will trip on stage in the middle of a grand performance when there is nothing to trip over, or things will go mysteriously missing from the dressing rooms."

Giry looked at her wide-eyed, incredulous at her friend's gullibility. "Even skilled dancers may be clumsy over their own feet," she said, "and I would not put petty theft above some of the maids that these managers hire."

"You don't understand."

Giry frowned slightly at her, bemused by the fervor in her voice.

Celeste's face had gone a shade paler, and she shook her head again. "Everyone else thought to blame it simply on the maids, on clumsiness – we were all quick to say it was nothing. But when Anton went missing –"

"Anton?"

"One of the stage men, you know, the one so thin you could see all the veins in his arms, his hair so greasy you could scarcely see through it to his face. He went missing one night and was never seen again." Before Giry could interrupt her, she went on, "And no one could say he ran off – he went missing _inside_ the Opera. The little dancer, Alise – she saw him go down into the rope cellar during the aria, but no one ever saw him come out again. It's too far down for windows, and there are no other exits from the rope cellar."

Giry considered this, and though she was unwilling to mention it, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck begin to rise. Something about this story gave her the worst feeling in her stomach. "Not even a body was ever found?"

"Not even a body." Celeste shook her head grimly.

Unable to think of anything more to offer, Giry fell silent. She turned the tale over and over again in her mind, and for the first time since entering the Opera Populaire that day allowed herself to think of Erik's name. Could it be possible that – but no, she would not think that, even if she would let herself think his name. It couldn't be possible, she told herself. It couldn't be.

In the corner of her mind, despite the gravity of the moment, Giry thought to herself that a shockingly inquisitive child like Meg would normally have loved such a story, and how strange it was that her daughter had said nothing in response to Celeste's account of it. She lifted her eyes from her friend's face, and looked around.

Besides the two of them, the dressing room was suddenly empty.

* * *

"Meg?" Giry called into the hallway, forgetting that she had left her cane near the settee on the other end of the room until Celeste hurried up behind her and handed it to her. "Marguerite!" 

She could hear the panic in her own voice and it only served to frighten her further. There was no reason to be frightened – the Opera was large, but it was full of people, and surely someone would notice a small girl and do something to detain her until her mother found her. At the same time, behind these thoughts, Giry knew with bleak certainty that Meg was not on the ground floor of the Opera, nor on the second floor, nor anywhere else above the surface of the ground.

And the moment she found the opportunity, she pointed Celeste down the other side of the main hallway and asked her to check the dressing rooms on the west wing of the Opera. When Celeste disappeared around the corner, she turned around, her knuckles whitening around the knob of her cane, and headed immediately for the nearest entrance into the cellars.

The moment she shut the door behind her and disappeared into the cavernous stairwell, she felt assaulted by the cool, dank air. The darkness swarmed around her, swallowed up everything she could see and licked even at her feet; the light of the candle she had stolen from the hallway table seemed wilted and defeated in such a darkness.

"Meg?" she called out as she reached the bottom of the stairs, her voice wavering in a way that displeased her.

All she could hear was the sound of water dripping from the ceiling and into the puddles on the stone. Her cane and shoes interrupted periodically, clicking loudly against the rock and kicking away the pebbles, but even louder than all those things was the silence that surrounded her from every angle. She knew the way, she had walked it a thousand times, but never before had it frightened her, and not only because Meg was lost now in its depths.

The labyrinth seemed to go on forever, even longer than she remembered it. She almost lost her balance a number of times, and due to her own carelessness she repeatedly slipped on the stones and had to lean against the cold, damp wall to regain herself. The candle was burning further and further down, and it was because of this decreasing light that she remembered suddenly about Erik's candles – when she had come to see him each night, years ago now, he had kept all the passages to his chambers illuminated with strings of candles and torches. Now, every corridor was dark and left unlit.

At the end of that eternity of stumbling and turning watery corners, she saw a distant glow at the end of the blackness. _There_ were the candles, she realized – all the candles, all the torches and lamps from all over the catacombs had been brought to one location, the one set of rooms that Erik had chosen for his home. As she approached, she could begin to separate the huge conglomeration of light into an impossible number of tiny dots, each dot a single flame.

She burst into the open of his large sitting room just as her candle burned down to a nub, and she dropped the misshapen lump of wax into the puddle by her feet as her eyes took in her surroundings incredulously.

The furniture – not only had he saved all the pitiful furniture she had managed to salvage for him, the chipped desks and three-legged chairs, but he had added pieces of his own, the origin of which she could not begin to guess. He had added stones to the walls to straighten them, to give them more of the semblance of a real home, and as she looked around she realized that, if she didn't know better, she would think she were in a normal above-ground room. The sofa and chairs were sumptuously upholstered, the table lacquered, and hanging on the stone wall was a number of mismatched paintings and portraits. The large oval rug that began several inches in front of her toes was beautifully woven, full of colors that she wouldn't have thought able to survive this far below the light of the sun.

Giry's eyes were drawn to a spot of pale fuzz on the sofa across from her, and her heart froze in her chest when she realized it was Meg's toy lamb.

The fingers gripping the cane began to hurt, and she whirled around, looking wildly into the darkness, into the other visible rooms, anywhere, for any sign of him. "Erik!" she called hoarsely. It wasn't rage behind her voice, nor was it rage that formed the knot in her chest – only shock, the shock of betrayal.

When she turned around again, looking back into the sitting room, she saw Erik seated calmly on the sofa beside the toy lamb.

He was older than she remembered him, and thinner; his dark hair, as well, was longer, and despite his elegant appearance (the clothes he wore were refined, and unfamiliar to her) it straggled unkempt around his chin. He sat with one leg crossed elegantly over the other, his hands folded in his lap – he sat with complete disregard for her presence, though he looked her in the face. He was wearing a mask, but it was not the mask she had helped him make, the mask that had begun to yellow with age – this mask, curving perfectly to the contours of what his face should have looked like, was black, and the eyes that looked at her from behind it were as strange to her as his clothing, as his newfound furnishings. Those eyes, she thought, were not Erik's – or, if they were, they had changed so drastically that she barely recognized them. These eyes no longer had any visible fear in them.

"Erik?" she said, as though refusing to believe that it could truly be Erik.

He smiled at her, but his smile was very small, and very cold, and it disappeared in only a moment. He nodded as though to acknowledge her arrival. "Welcome back at last, mademoiselle."

* * *

_To be continued._

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	9. Part Nine

_The Angel of Music_

by aeipathy.

_Notes_: I don't really have that much to say this time around, or that much time in which to say it. I tried to update as quickly as I could, but this chapter was long and emotional for me to write, I suppose. In any case, I want to thank you all for reading, and reviewing; you don't know how much it means to me.

_Part Nine_

The sensation in Giry's stomach as she looked at Erik was like a combination of all the things it had ever felt before: a gnawing, acidic bitterness, sharp nausea, and perhaps most strongly of all, the vacant ache of hunger. Her hand loosened around her cane, but she didn't hear it fall as it clattered on the stone floor. Instead, unconsciously, her hands drifted to curl around the fabric of her skirts in loose, restless fists.

"Erik," she said again, dumbly. Suddenly everything, including the power of articulate thought, flooded out of her mind. She quickly forgot the fuzzy toy lamb at his side, and what it was meant to remind her of. Her chest filled with a painful warmth. "I feared you for dead."

It seemed he could tell that she was speaking a truth of which even she had been unaware. He watched her silently, his expression unchanging, but it seemed there was a tiny flicker in the eyes behind the unfeeling black mask. He said nothing for a moment, but his right hand moved onto the cushion beside him, and his long, dexterous fingers toyed absently but lovingly with the false wool of the lamb. The thin flesh of his lips, so like scar tissue, jerked again into a tiny, fleeting smile – twitchy like his hands – and then it disappeared, leaving his face hollow and hurt, stony and shifty.

"Mademoiselle," he said again, and his voice was soft, music even when he spoke in low tones. She almost flinched, made suddenly to recall the shy, lilting notes he had sung when she had encouraged him to accompany her playing during those first clumsy violin lessons. He said, "You would do wrong to put so little trust in me. Your Erik, dead? Fallen?"

His faintly mocking tone startled her into a numb search for an explanation. Never before had she felt compelled to explain herself; it was only now, when faced with an older, crueler Erik, that she had lost her prevailing sense of dignity. "No one else knows you're here – you could have grown ill, with no one to care for you. You could have run out of food." She grasped at straws, realizing that she had no idea how he managed, how he lived, on his own – yet clearly he must have found his own ways, in her absence. "You could even have slipped and fallen – or the walls of your own home could have crumbled down upon your head. I didn't know. I – I feared."

Erik's fingers tensed momentarily on the lamb's ear. "I do not fall ill, mademoiselle, you know that," he said simply. "Despite what my appearance would lead others to believe, my constitution is not so weak. As for food, I have developed my own methods of obtaining what I need, and – well, as for the rest – I am not so clumsy, nor so unsuspecting."

His words stung her. She resented him, for saying these things, for seeking to hurt her outright with his own strength – but she knew she had no right to resent him, and that only made her resent him the more.

"You have been so creative in inventing the possibilities of my death, mademoiselle." His voice was shielded by the façade of morbid humor, but there was something beneath it that struck her ears as sharply as a blow. "I almost feel as though you might have hoped for it – as though, perhaps, you were counting on it."

She stared at him, aghast. This was not the Erik she remembered. "How can you say such things?" She felt the need to hit him across the face, to shake him by the shoulders, to bring him back to his senses. "Do not act a fool, Erik – do not suspect me of such cruelty."

The word "cruelty" summoned another small smile to twist his lips, but this time it was a steady one, and when it finally did disappear, it disappeared slowly, taking its time. It forced her to remember the accusation she had placed upon herself, when she had confessed to him her intentions to marry Briand – she had accused herself, then, of cruelty. It _had_ been cruelty with which she had treated him, in abandoning him, but she would never have been so cruel as to pray for his death – not after having worked so hard to save his life.

She looked at him now, a grown man, nearly as old as herself, and for the first time she felt as though she didn't recognize him, as though she needed to second-guess herself – as though this may not have been Erik after all. Tall and thin to the point of frailty, this young man sat regally before her with long sections of hair that brushed to his shoulders and fell lightly against his mask, and these things were somewhat familiar to her; but there was something new about him which was new and frightening – a stiffness, a remoteness, as though the core of him had hardened and was now as cold and untouchable as stone.

Had she done this, then? In spite of all her pride, all her unflinching immovability, Giry felt a momentary weakening of her resolve. She tried to find the right things to say, the right questions to ask, and then all at once her mind cleared – what surfaced was an image of her daughter, of Meg's heart-shaped face, of her pretty blue eyes.

"Meg," she said suddenly. "Erik, what have you done with my daughter?"

He furrowed his brow, though his hand moved more smoothly over the wool of the toy lamb as though he found this distraction to be a reassuring one. "Done with her?" he repeated slowly.

"That is her toy. I know she's here, Erik. Please, do not do this to me." She feared that at any moment she might sink into a pile on the cobbles. Her pride mattered nothing to her now, not so long as her daughter's location, her state of well-being, remained unknown. "I know – I know I've hurt you, I know I've hurt you terribly. And I know I have no right to ask you for your forgiveness, not now. Things have not changed, and nothing has happened to pardon me for my heartless actions towards you. But please, please, Erik – Meg has done nothing. She is only four years old – she had never set foot in any room in this Opera before today. Give her back to me."

Erik became still, but his posture remained straight and elegant, and his eyes, which flicked back upon her, seemed to sharpen and gleam. "You have become afraid of me," he whispered.

She said nothing.

"You have always been a little bit afraid of me, but now you can scarcely look at me without turning as white as a sheet." He closed his fingertips around the tail of the lamb and pulled it slightly nearer to the side of his leg. "You suspect me of such horrors, _now_ – are you so quick to forget the hours you spent with me, night after night, sitting patiently by my side and reading me stories? Are you so quick to forget all the foolish awe and adoration I lavished upon you since the day you saved me?"

Giry's arms shivered, and the tremor spread to her hands and fingers. "Erik," she said.

"I suppose I fault only myself for being insufficiently clear in expressing my feelings," he murmured. "Though the circumstances were nothing of the sort, one would have thought I were some ridiculous usher-boy about to confess my love to a blushing ballerina, the way I always shrank from you, from the very _idea_ of you. No – you need not search for the words to interrupt me, mademoiselle." His eyes flashed. "I understand your hesitance to hear such things, but please keep in mind that I have had very few genuine conversations in the last five years, and so I feel it necessary to make the absolute most of this one."

She fell silent.

"I would like to be able to say that I cherished the idea of you more than the reality with which you presented me, but I fear I would be lying – for the idea of you became the reality, soon enough. The day you freed me from my cage and led me away from the carnage and the captors I had known nearly all my life, I had no choice – I had no choice but to see you as a godsend, as an angel. I thought you were my angel, mademoiselle, for quite a long time: the angel that had been sent to save me. And I did not feel this way only at first, only until I grew out of such childish notions; on the contrary, with nothing to show me otherwise, to prove me wrong, you remained perfect, perfect and good, for a number of years."

He picked up the lamb now and held it in both hands with all the caution of a mother, smiling gently at it. "I was like a lamb," he said softly. "A silly, stupid little lamb. A lamb kept in a cage and beaten by its shepherds, perhaps, but a lamb – for the moment I was pulled away from the gypsy caravan and down into these cellars, I found another shepherd, a shepherd much kinder than any of the others, and I followed her with all the wonder and love of any mistreated, misguided little sheep."

The edges of Giry's vision blurred, and for a moment she wondered if she were slipping through time – if five years had not passed at all – if in fact ten years had not passed, and if she were still the thoughtless little girl who came each night to comfort and read to her despairing, helpless charge.

"Erik, please," she said densely, speaking through the thunder in her ears. "Please give me back my daughter."

But he ignored her, merely dropped the lamb in his lap and leaned forward, away from the back of the settee. His hands were in his lap, folded delicately. "Every day seemed longer and emptier than the last, and every night when you appeared at the bottom of those stairs – when your face appeared like a specter in the shadows – all I wanted to do was to take your hands and kiss them, to kneel before you and worship you like the god that everyone else holds responsible for their own salvation."

Dismayed, she shook her head. "I am no god," she protested in a stifled voice. "I have never been anything but myself, Erik. I have never been anything but someone who wanted desperately to help you."

He looked up at her. "You are lucky I am not a lamb," he said mildly. "For if a shepherd were to suddenly abandon his flock, each and every lamb would die – they would die, along with all their memories of their master."

She felt as though she had been slapped. Worse, in fact, she felt as though he had stabbed her through the heart – but the wound would have been fully deserved. Never in her life had she felt so full of this ache, the soreness of her own guilt, and yet he continued to sit there, looking at her calmly, describing the ways in which she had injured him with scarcely the barest sign of ever having felt the pain of her blows.

"Tell me," he said, and she caught a furtive undertone to his voice. "What exactly do you think I've done with your daughter?" When she said nothing, his lips twisted wryly. "Speechless? Do you find yourself incapable of speaking aloud the horrors of which you suspect me guilty?"

"Please don't," she said.

Erik studied her, and though his words were harsh they were nearly whispered, rushing out of him like soft fire. "You should be ashamed of yourself," he said. "I have told you now more than I ever thought I would have the courage to tell you. I have told you that I thought you an angel, that my heart raced at the very sight of you, at the very sound of your footsteps. Do you think I would even permit myself to dream of laying a finger upon your daughter?" His eyes watched her, penetrating her defenses; he did not blink, and although he almost smiled, the smile chilled her. "No matter what rifts may exist between us now, mademoiselle, _she_ can be nothing but innocent to me. I would rather die than do her the slightest harm."

Giry's lips parted and her breath slid out of her all at once, her lungs collapsing in relief. Somehow, she believed him, and she locked his words inside her heart like a promise she intended to keep for always.

It took her a moment to catch her breath again, and he watched her silently. For an instant his face nearly softened – his eyes nearly showed concern – but then he caught himself, and turned his face away. He looked briefly at the lamb and then fixed his gaze on the far wall, tensing.

"But I cannot claim to be free of guilt," he murmured. "The laws that I obey regarding you and your daughter do not, unfortunately, apply to everyone else."

Giry almost didn't ask. "What do you mean?"

"Would you like to see?" He slowly looked back at her, and then began to speak aloud to himself, quietly, having a one-sided conversation. "Perhaps you have the right to see, you above all others. But then, perhaps it would be too much – you have not done enough to merit that kind of trust, that kind of loyalty on my part. It may be too shocking. Even you may not be brave enough to withstand such a sight."

"Erik," she began, her voice not entirely steady, "what are you talking about?"

His eyes sharpened and returned to her face, returned from whatever invisible sight they had been so preoccupied with. "I will show you," he said then. "You ought to see what kind of friends I have been making, in your absence."

He lifted his hand into the air, no higher than the area level with his shoulder, and crooked his index finger in a peculiar fashion. She watched the strange, beckoning gesture, and almost mistook it as a signal for her to come forward – but before she could move, she saw the reaction occur, as quickly as if his finger had been attached to a thin thread leading across the room. A door which she had previously ignored suddenly came open, and sliding slightly out from inside it, as though supported on an unseen set of wheels, was an open, upright coffin.

The coffin itself was of inferior quality, no better than a cheap wooden box, and the form laid inside it was dressed in plain, shabby clothing. Giry immediately drew back, alarmed and revolted by the sight, and she pressed her hand against her mouth to suppress her gasp. The body indicated that the man had been dead for at least a year, but as he had not been buried beneath the soil, he had been untouched by the wear of rain and insects – his dry flesh clung against his bones like old parchment, his mouth agape, his teeth almost black. His thin hair, every bit as greasy as she had expected, hung in limp strands from where it clung feebly to his skull.

So this, Giry thought to herself in disgust, was what had happened to Anton, the stage man.

Erik's voice shocked her eyes away from the corpse. "Those who are not you or your daughter," he said calmly, "are not treated with such courtesy."

Unknowingly, she looked at him as someone might look at a child who has done something horrible, but something which he isn't old enough to understand is horrible. She could barely form the words to chastise him, for in her mind she knew she had no place to chastise him at all. "Erik, how could you do such a thing?"

"Anyone so heedless and misguided as to wander through my home," he said slowly, "is not deserving of a fate other than the one I would offer him."

There was silence, as Giry tried desperately not to look back over at the corpse of the stage man. Noticing her distress, Erik made another gesture that she caught only in the corner of her eye, and so quickly that she took another step backward, the coffin rolled back into the dark space and the door closed shut over it. She stared at the door for a long second as though disbelieving that, behind its mysterious barrier, the coffin, and the body, still existed – as though disbelieving that they existed at all outside of Erik's own secret world.

Unfazed, he picked up the toy again. "How old did you say your daughter was?"

"Four – four years old."

He studied the lamb quietly, turning it over in his hands, and nodded his head. "She is very graceful for her age," he said simply. "I heard you telling Celeste that you would like to have her dance with the other girls, while you teach them. I think this would be a very good idea – a wonderful way to exploit her blossoming talent, and her interest, at the same time."

Giry nodded wordlessly.

"I heard of the unfortunate death of your husband, and wish I could have extended my condolences earlier. I am sure he was a good man."

Though his voice contained no audible trace of contempt, she felt sure that he meant to hurt her – that his intention was only to make her suffer by mentioning her husband, whose loss still grieved her terribly. Her fists tightened, and she moved forward, limping painfully without her cane and yet feeling none of the pain. As she approached him, Erik rose to his feet, the lamb still in his right hand. He was taller than before, and now she was forced to tilt her chin further back than she remembered having to, and only so that she could look him in the face.

And his face – the mask was in the way, she could not see it. She could barely see his eyes. Her mind was blank as a slate when she lifted her hands, and as there had been no thoughts for him to read, Erik was entirely unprepared when she removed the mask from his face.

"No!"

The cry escaped immediately from his lips, before any other part of him reacted, and the sound of his voice lifted in panic made the blood in Giry's veins change direction. She almost dropped the mask to the floor, but she was unable to, for his hands were faster – the lamb having fallen from their grip, they came out of nowhere, seizing the mask from her and pressing it to his face, and even before it was properly secured his left hand flew into the air, poised in position to strike her.

To her own surprise, she did not flinch; a part of her expected his blows and would have welcomed them. The sight of his face, for the first time in over a decade, was enough to drive all feelings and thoughts from her brain and, in spite of herself, make her want to die.

Somehow it was worse, far worse, than the sight of the stage man's corpse had been. It was worse than anything. She had been granted only an instant to look, but perhaps that had been too long. The mask, smooth and sculpted, gave him the solemn, narrow-eyed appearance of a black marble statue, its lines long and straight, its edges crisp – but the reality was so very different. His face was not precise, not a measured thing – it was unruly and ruined, what he had once called one of God's mistakes. She remembered the flattened ridge of his nose, the empty holes of his nostrils, and suddenly even the dank stench of the caves smelled as beautiful as a field of flowers – the grimace of his mouth, his thin stretched lips and pointed bestial teeth, made her for a moment forget how well she knew him, made her imagine him ripping her open with his fangs and devouring her flesh. He could have killed her, she knew, in any number of ways, and the most painful of all was simply to let her look at his face.

Again covered by the mask, Erik seemed to struggle in that moment, his eyes wild. He would have hit her, she knew – but then he remembered himself, and his arm drooped and fell to his side, his hand joining the other in pressing the mask more securely against his face. His eyes darted madly, his chest heaving with the great gulps of air sucked in through his mouth. He was like a wild animal.

"How dare you," he hissed, his voice like acid, like poison. "How dare you think yourself worthy to look at my face?"

She let her hands, which had remained hovering in the air, fall stilted and broken back to her sides. "It was wrong of me," she only said, too shocked by him, and by herself, to say any more. "I'm sorry."

"How dare you think yourself worthy, after what you've done?" He too let his hands fall, and he looked at her with hatred from beneath his riotous hair. Through the hole of the mask, she could see the shine of his bared teeth. "No woman is ever meant to look upon a face like mine! One glimpse would be enough to strip her of her soul, of her freedom. Why do you think that is, mademoiselle? Do you think it must be because of how handsome I am?" He laughed then, a loud and screeching laugh, full of pain and rage. "How ironic, that a woman like you, who finds me so ugly, would remove my mask of her own free will! How ironic that the woman who deserted me would finally return, only to make a mistake that would keep her forever by my side."

Giry looked at him in pity, and what she knew to be disdain. They did not surprise her, these silly games of his. "I apologize," she said quietly. "I – shouldn't have done that." She struggled with herself for a moment, with the mechanics of her own voice. "I do not find you ugly, Erik. I have never found you ugly."

"No?" he said mockingly, staring her in the face. "You mean to say that you find _this_ pleasant to look at – that you find _this_ beautiful?" He snarled at her, his shoulders bristling like the back of an angered cat. "I'm sure it would be wonderful – being able to say that you spent all those years taking care of me because you liked to look at me." His voice had lowered, and was stilted, infuriated. "It would be easy, wouldn't it?"

"Erik, stop this."

"Then, even were I as handsome as your valiant Briand, you still would have left me? Surely, then, it was not my face which chased you off, made you leave, you say – it was something else. You wanted a home, you wanted a child – could I not have given these things to you?" He bore down upon her like a predator, his hands in mid-air, always bare inches away from seizing her wrists, her throat.

She stared at him, shocked. "Erik –"

He saw the color her eyes had turned and scoffed at her in disgust. "Do not think so highly of yourself. I am the first to admit my own foolishness, and naiveté – for a man cannot marry a woman, nor have a child, without taking her to bed, is that not right, mademoiselle? And I had no desire to take you to bed, not then and certainly not now. I say with pride that I am above such loathsome desires, which clearly you are not." He looked at her sideways again. "My idea of love, of marriage, was apparently quite different from what yours turned out to be."

At the other end of his stare, Giry abruptly felt unclean, ashamed of herself. She brushed the palms of her hands over her skirts as though trying to wipe the dirt from them.

Slowly his breaths began to regain an even quality, and they grew softer, less violent. Turned away from her, he seemed to recover his composure, and he took a long stabilizing breath, reaching down and picking up the lamb which he had dropped to the floor in his haste. "Forgive me for my outburst," he said in a much quieter voice, his breath still slightly audible between his words. "My temper is something I have never quite succeeded in bringing under my full control."

All she could do was nod, though surely he did not need her forgiveness, not now.

"It is a strange, strange world we live in," he mused, "though we live in very different worlds, now." Lowering the lamb, he looked up, his eyes on her face, and somehow, they had lost all the intimidating gleam with which they had been previously infused. "Marguerite, little Meg – you are truly afraid that I will kill her? That I have killed her already?"

She felt another quake run down her spine, but when she opened her mouth, no words emerged. She closed it again and shut her eyes as well. He was not asking her in seriousness; he did not truly want an answer, not after what he had said before, what he had promised her. There was hurt in his voice, in his eyes – hurt, that she would think it of him to begin with.

"You truly suspect me of such a crime?"

His tone remained serene, as though he were speaking to a child who has been shaken by a violent fall or a petrifying thunderstorm. She lifted her eyes to look upon his face again, upon his mask, and she saw with surprise that he was looking at her sympathetically. She said simply, "I know that accidents have happened, in the past."

"Not that accidents have happened," he corrected her, but still, his voice bore no trace of whimsy. "That I have killed before."

"Yes," she said. "I know."

Erik exhaled, flexing his fingers over the lamb, and looked her in the face again. "More," he said, "than you know."

"I have seen you kill only once," she said, "but I know you've killed again."

Erik looked as though he pitied her. "You know only what Celeste has told you, and she knows very little," he responded. "But I cannot deny that she was right in what she did say." His voice was almost sad, but he succeeded in concealing any trace of it. "You may at last, if you wish, join the others from whom you have always fought so hard to put yourself apart. You may think of me as a monster."

Giry caught his gaze and held it. She said, "You are bitter." When he did not answer, she said, "You hate every member of humanity for what has been done to you, and while you may look at me with pity, you do not have enough mercy in you to stifle your own desires when you feel the want to cause pain. I have seen you kill with no regrets and I do not have to struggle to believe that you will have killed again, and with the same brutal ruthlessness." She took a long breath in a last attempt to compose herself. "But in spite of all this, Erik, you are capable of – you are _filled_ with the capacity for so much more, and there is so much love lying dormant somewhere inside you. You could not kill my daughter. You _would not_ kill her."

Erik merely looked at her for a long moment, utterly unmoving. His voice was still quiet, still the same kind murmur with which he had been speaking to her since he had calmed himself following what he referred to as "his outburst". She marveled at his newfound sense of composure, at how, after five years, he had managed to suppress his childish tendencies to throw tantrums, at least when she was concerned. She marveled at how someone so calm, so held back, could be the same person they were discussing: the same person who was able to kill, and had done so at least twice, with "brutal ruthlessness".

He said, "If I were capable of such a sin, what would you offer me, for her life?"

Again Giry finally released the fabric of her skirts, and her hands and fingers ached with the sting of having been in one tense position for too long. "Mine," she said. "_My_ life, however you would have it."

He gave no sign of whether or not her answer impressed him. Instead, he continued to regard her, his refined hands poised like a gentleman's at his waist; she suddenly remembered the day she had seen his shadow in the rafters from the rehearsal stage, and then the space behind her eyelids filled with a vivid portrait of him at the Opera, in the audience, studying all the other men and arranging himself into their poses.

She said, "I will take responsibility for her, if her presence has offended you."

Erik continued to stare back into her eyes, undaunted.

"Erik," she said. "Forgive me."

His lips tensed, and his right hand seemed to twitch as well.

Giry realized then that she had expended all her strength, all her courage, and at this point she felt so exhausted and afraid that she might at any moment disappear into the floor beneath her feet. She could do nothing else but resort to her typical defense; she could only retreat behind an indifferent pretense, a mask not unlike Erik's – a disguise to give the impression of peace when the reality beneath the surface was chaotic and full of pain.

She took another long breath, almost a sigh, and said, "I will be moving back into the Opera very shortly, as you know, and Meg will be joining me." She ignored the hitch in her own voice when she said her daughter's name. "If you will permit it, Erik, I intend to resume my visits to you in order to make up for my unforgivable absence over these years."

As always, Erik was able to see beyond her mask, and he nodded his head, his throat moving. He said, "I will permit it." He said, "But I have become a busier man than you may remember, mademoiselle, and I occupy my time with much more important things than sketching and playing the violin, now."

"I understand. I will not bother you." She bowed her head. "I will see to it, as well, that my daughter does not bother you."

As her gaze was turned towards the floor, she did not see if Erik made any gesture or mouthed any words above her head, but it was as though he had cast some form of mysterious hex while her eyes were turned away – for all of a sudden something tugged on her skirt, by her right side, and she nearly jumped a mile. When she whirled around, she saw her daughter, unhurt but wide-eyed with curiosity and perhaps a pale shade of fear, at being in such a dark, frightening cavern.

"Meg!" Giry couldn't help herself – all of her tranquility was swept away in the largest flood of relief that she had ever known. She threw her arms around her daughter and lifted the child off the ground, embracing her more tightly against her chest than she would ever have done normally. It was only with all her strength that she managed to keep herself from bursting into tears.

"_Never_ do that again, Meg – _never _go off alone in a strange place without telling me first! What were you thinking?"

Meg looked at her with an annoyed frown, absently pushing at her mother to escape the fervent kiss which Giry pressed against her forehead. "But Mama, you talked for so long – I got so bored. And Monsieur said he would show me his house – I wasn't alone."

Giry finally managed to calm herself down, but she continued to grip Meg tightly in her arms as she slid her eyes away from her daughter and back onto Erik. He had been watching them expressionlessly the entire time, giving no indication of surprise at Meg's sudden appearance, which only enforced Giry's incredulous suspicion that he had somehow conjured her out of thin air. Additionally, Erik had retrieved the toy lamb, and with a smile, he held it out to Meg, saying, "Little Meg is quite right; though I suppose that next time I must ask your mother's permission before I give you a tour of the cellars, mustn't I?"

Meg took the toy and smiled back at him, shyly. It seemed she had taken quite a liking to Erik during whatever exchanges they had been able to have. After all, she had no idea that he had killed – she had no idea that he had a loathing for all children, that he was able only to remember their screaming and laughing on the other side of the bars of his cage.

Erik's eyes flicked back onto Giry, and his smile broke and then disappeared. "Forgive me if I do not escort you and your daughter to the exit, mademoiselle," he said, for Meg's benefit. "I have a great deal to attend to."

She nodded speechlessly, and allowed Meg to slip out of her arms and onto the floor. With a final little curtsy to Erik, the little girl turned and began to run off, but when the lamb slipped from her hands and into a puddle on the stone, she stopped with a cry, temporarily distracted with retrieving it and cleaning it off. Giry watched her open-mouthed, but then turned back to Erik, bewildered.

Behind the mask, Erik's face tried to be cold – it tried so hard that Giry's resolve nearly crumbled into dust. She looked at him for a long time, silently, her eyes scanning his face, and tolerantly he let her do it, though he clearly itched to turn away as soon as he possibly could, after having had to show his weakness to her once again. Giry reached out and closed her hands around Erik's, drawing them towards her. He flinched violently and looked at her with murderously shocked eyes, clearly forced to stifle his first instinct, which was to snatch back his hands or strike her across the face.

_All I wanted was to take your hands and kiss them, to kneel before you and worship you like the god that everyone else holds responsible for their own salvation._

She lifted his hands to her face and pressed his lips against his palms, more cautiously and gently than she had kissed Meg's irritated face. She could feel a tremor shake his fingers and run up his arms, a tremor of fear and disgust as though he had touched something wretched or filthy, and without looking up she knew that he was staring at her in horror, that his lips had fallen open and that he was struggling to think of something to say, a curse with which he could chase her off. She released his hands and he drew them back immediately, but did not curse her, and did not hit her. She looked up into his face and said, again, "Forgive me."

He said nothing, but that was thoroughly acceptable to her; the sounds of Meg swiping at the wool of her lamb with her sleeve were more than enough for her ears at the moment. Giry looked up into his face, trying to fight against the tightness in her throat. She said, "I will spend the rest of my life trying to give you back what I have taken away."

He began to speak, but his voice failed him, it came out small and broken. He tried again. "The rest of your life," he repeated. "You are so willing to promise away the rest of your life to someone like me?"

Somehow, Giry smiled. "The moment I made up my mind to save you, I knew I was making a choice that would forever change my life. I have no reservations now."

Erik might have faltered then – she could see in his eyes that if he were at all to come apart, to drop his guard, it would have been at that moment. His eyes seemed too large, about to swallow up the mask in front of them, and they had suddenly grown pink and filled with moisture, but he made a strange noise in his throat as though trying to clear it, and the redness faded. He looked at her again, for a long moment – it seemed that he was testing her, searching her for falsehood – and finally he nodded his head, swallowing a second time.

"Foolish little girl," he murmured, so softly that she almost couldn't hear it. "You always were so much more foolish than you supposed yourself."

But despite his damning words, there was no malice in his tone, only sorrow, and exhaustion. He suddenly looked as weary as though he had lived for a hundred years, and as though he had spent each year of that hundred down in those chambers, an eternity below the surface of the earth.

He spoke, and despite his words, his voice was unexpectedly thick. "It is a great shame." He said, "It is a great shame that you have not visited the Opera in five years; they have been putting on shows of _Idomeneo_ which are quite a bit better than average. And for once, even the vain little dancers have not been tripping over their own feet… unless I decide to step in, of course – and make them trip."

* * *

_To be continued._

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